


Courses Once Charted

by MagpieMinx (CardinalFox)



Series: ...Then Still I Would Love You. [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe Bonanza, Amnesia, Angst, Boss/Employee Relationship, Dubious Consent, F/M, Force-Sensitive Hux, Force-Sensitive Reader, Hux needs healthy outlets for his aggression, Lima Syndrome, Long Distance Relationship, POV Second Person, Reader-Insert, Sass, Slice of Life, Snark, Stockholm Syndrome, Unhealthy relationships to cope with grief, Unwanted Advances, Violence, Will add more tags as we go, married au, parental abandonment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-07-12 23:08:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7127138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CardinalFox/pseuds/MagpieMinx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan. "No. Nobody is ever told that."</i>  The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis</p><p>Or</p><p>Five Lives That Might Have Been and One Life That Was</p><p>Companion to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/6090745/chapters/13960420">Crash Course.</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hollow Bravery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An AU in which Hux was your peer mentor during his final year at the Imperial Academy, and a little of what happened after.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"Perhaps_  
>  _by breaking_  
>  _our hearts first,_  
>  _love is testing_  
>  _our faith in_  
>  _fairy tales and_  
>  _happy endings."_  
>  -[Mansi Jikadara B.](http://wnq-writers.com/post/144673481810/perhaps-by-breaking-our-hearts-first-love-is)
> 
> Dedicated to K, without whom this chapter would never have even happened, as an early birthday present!

She’s nonplussed as she slides into the chair across from him, eyeing him with a skepticism that he’s both entirely used to and totally irritated by.  He’s sure that she doesn’t particularly appreciate the way he’s sizing her up either, or the fact that until she proves otherwise, he finds her wanting.  For her part, she seems unable to decide whether she’s cursed or fortunate to have the Commandant’s son as her assigned mentor.

“Questions?” he inquires, drumming his fingers idly on the table because he’s required to do  _ something _ with his assigned mentee and this is as good a place as any to start.  It’s also an excellent place, as far as he’s concerned, to stop if she proves at all stupid.  Based on the conversations of other mentor-mentee pairs he can hear around them, he doesn’t have high hopes.

“I’d rather not,” she responds, her eyebrows lifting as she regards him warily, as if he might lunge across the table and try to bite her.  He sighs in exasperation, knowing that he will never live down biting that one cadet’s ear off, not until he leaves the Academy for good.

“Is that because you don’t have a question or because the question is stupid?” he asks flatly, fully expecting her to bridle at the insult.  She doesn’t disappoint, reacts almost exactly the way he expected her to, sitting up a little straighter, her chin lifting a little higher over the collar of her uniform.

“More because the question is rude and I don’t have leave to speak freely,” she fires back defensively, bristling, glaring at him as if he’s some kind of unanticipated challenge.

“I’m not your superior officer,” he says with a snort, continuing to drum his fingers against the table as a thin smile of disgust begins to spread across his face.  It doesn’t reach his eyes and leaves them cold, remote, but somehow this expression doesn’t daunt her the way it’s supposed to, the way it has so many other cadets.

“No, but I was told that I’m  _ supposed _ to address my mentor with  _ respect _ ,” she answers tartly, strangely unintimidated by him.  It’s hard to determine if she’s faking it, but either way, it seems she’s not  _ entirely _ worthless.

“What’s your question?” He would rather they move this initial conversation right along so that he doesn’t have to suffer it a second longer than he absolutely has to.  He can think of half a dozen other things he would rather be doing that sitting at this table, even if his mentee isn’t as much of an idiot as he dreaded she was going to be.

“Are you going to be this much of an asshole at every meeting?”

His fingers go still as he gives his mentee a hard look, reappraising her and taking in the exasperated resignation on her face.  The exchange they’ve had thus far has been nothing like what he envisioned, and now that the script he expected has been thrown out the window, he finds he even wants to know a little more about her.

“Depends,” he muses aloud, watches as she shifts in her seat.  She leans forward now that she senses she  _ really _ has his attention, rests her elbows on the table and cocks her head like bird, watching him with bright, curious eyes.

“On how stupid I am?” she quips, managing to sound completely serious and completely not all at once.

“Oh, you’re not stupid,” he responds, willing to make this concession at least because she’s not.  She’s managed to surprise him to a certain extent, and that makes him willing to give her the benefit of the doubt in ways he didn’t previously plan to.

“And you’re still an ass.  Glad we have all our cards on the table,” she answers, lifting one hand, palm up, and making a flourishing, graceful gesture like she’s presenting their circumstances.  Paired with the sardonic curl of her sudden smile, he finds that it actually takes effort to keep himself from being charmed.

“And your question was..?” he queries, deflecting her comment and neatly refocusing the conversation in four words.  He congratulates himself mentally for this bit of verbal adeptness, wonders idly if she appreciates it, if she’s even noticed.

“I already asked my question,” she says mildly, folding her hands and resting her chin on them, watching him with wide eyes and just parted lips.  It’s deceptive, all that innocent openness she’s putting on display for him because no one survives this long in the Academy and is that unguarded.

“ _ That _ was your question?” he demands incredulously, losing his composure for a moment at the audacity of her answer.  He can count on the fingers of one hand the number of cadets with balls big enough to speak to him like that in spite of who his father is, and most of them do it as a result of envy and sheer stupidity.  There’s one backstabbing viper that’s more subtle about it, but his mentee is bold, flaunting her challenge so overtly that it becomes covert.  It has something to do with the wry smile she delivers it with too, but he’s still impressed despite himself.

“Was I supposed to have another question?” she asks, still holding onto the feigned innocence that looks believable enough that he has to remind himself  _ again _ that it’s not real.

“I assumed you were going to take this relatively seriously,” he replies, lacking anything else to say.

“I’m taking this very seriously,” she says with mock woundedness, and he glares at her, unsure of whether or not she’s making fun of him.

“Is that how you take things seriously?” He can feel the disgust creeping back across his face in the form of a haughty sneer.

“Look, if you’re going to be this insufferable at every meeting, tell me now,” she says with a deep, long sigh as she rolls her eyes.

“You can count this as your warning then,” he tells her derisively.

“I figured.”

~

Somewhere along the way, it got easier.

“You’re holding back,” she complains, retreating from him in two quick steps, letting her hands drop from guard to rest on her hips.  Her mouth is turned down as she glares at him, frustrated.

“Oh, I’m sorry, did you want to go to the infirmary?” he responds, backing up a step and wiping the back of his hand across his forehead before he slings the sweat off his fingers with the flick of a wrist.

“I’ll put  _ you _ there if you don’t take this more seriously,” she threatens as she takes the hem of her shirt and pulls it up to wipe her face, bending so she doesn’t have to stretch it quite so far.  He snorts, quickly tallying up on his fingers how many times each of them has been to the infirmary.

“You been there... five times since we started sparring regularly, and  _ three _ times I had to carry you there,” he points out with a smug little smile, “Whereas I’ve been to the infirmary  _ twice _ and made it there under my own power  _ both _ times.”

“You’re forgetting the first time when I told you to go to the infirmary and you refused even though you got  _ knocked out _ ,” she answers, one eyebrow arching in disbelief as she steps toward him again and takes up a guard stance.

“Doesn’t count, I didn’t go to the infirmary,” he says, mimicking her stance and beckoning her closer.  She shuffles another step forward so that she’s just out of his reach, poised on the balls of her bare feet, ready to launch herself at him.

“For someone so smart, you can be awfully stupid.  You had a concussion,” she says, and then she leaps forward, her fist going straight for his face.  He brings up his forearm to block the blow, bring his own fist around in a hook aimed at the center of her body mass.  She evades it easily, turning and going for a mid-level kick that lands hard on his thigh.

“And you were kind enough to stay up with me that night.  Did I ever thank you for that?” he says as they break apart, wondering if he’s going to end up with a fresh bruise, if he’ll even be able to tell if there is.  They spar whenever they have coinciding free time, which happens more often than one might think, especially in the evening after dinner.  They do their homework together over their dirty dishes in silence and then find an empty training room.

“Why am I the one setting a good example?  You’re supposed to be  _ my _ mentor, not the other way ‘round,” she grumbles, then yelps as she gets her hands up to guard her face, catching the punch he’s thrown at her.

“Quit distracting yourself,” he scolds as he catches her by the wrist and pulls.  She resists, and then he lets go and she stumbles backwards and lands on her ass.  He pounces like a copper-colored cat, and then they’re wrestling, trying to pin each other down with a hold.

“We’ve been doing this too much,” she pants as she rolls, throwing a leg over his arm and trying get her legs across his chest.  He twists, prevents it, tries to hold her down on the floor with his weight, ends up with her knee in his stomach knocking the breath out of him.

“Stop complaining,” he wheezes as she struggles to wiggle her way out of his grip.  Even though he can barely breathe, he’s still stronger than she is, and when he does get his breath back, he manages to flip her over and put his knee in her back.

“Yield,” he commands, and she squirms under his hands, glaring up at him over her shoulder, teeth showing beneath her curled lip.

“Fuck you, Bren,” she mutters, and he laughs briefly, still breathless.

“Nice try,” he tells her dryly, “Are we done?”

“You’re a pain in the ass,” she spits, twisting, trying to dislodge him, testing the strength of his hold.  He doesn’t relent, if anything, he bears down harder, knowing that she’s stalling to distract him, will take any advantage she can get.

“I thought you were better with anatomy than that,” he says, shifting his grip on her wrists because her skin is slick with sweat and his palms are too.  Between the two of them, it’s like they’ve been oiled, and when she rotates her wrist, it slides under his palm a little too easily.  His fingers close harder, hard enough to bruise, but he considers it fair payment for the bruises on his thighs from all the kicks he’s taken.

“I’m better at anatomy than you,” she tells him tartly, her fingers curling into a fist as she twists and tries to heave him off again, “What side of the body are you on?”  The last sentence is panted more than said, and she winces when his kneecap grinds painfully into her spine.

“Your dorsal, my anterior,” he responds, willing to indulge her for a little bit while he savors the impending formal declaration of his victory.

“Name the bones,” she fires back, looking up at him from the corner of her eye.

“Femur, patella, tibia, and fibula,” he lists briefly, letting himself sound bored, “Lumbar vertebrae.”

“Ligaments and muscles.”

“Stop stalling-”  The word ends in a yelp of pain as she twists unexpectedly, back arching to land her heel against his body hard enough to knock him off-balance.  She rips herself free of his hold and rolls onto her feet, pouncing on him just as he’s trying to recover.  They hit the floor in a tangle of limbs, scrabbling for the advantage, both of them panting with the effort.

Grappling takes too much energy for either of them to taunt the other, too much concentration to string words together in a coherent fashion.  They clutch at each other, tumbling over the mat, attempting to seize each other’s limbs and failing as they jerk or twist free.  He tries to catch her ankle and then nearly gets kicked in the face for the effort, barely ducking out of the way and feeling the soon-to-be bruise on his shoulder blade anew.

Finally, she gets a leg up and wrapped around his side, rolls them both over so she’s sitting triumphantly on his chest, his arms trapped under her thighs.  She grins gleefully down at him, gloating.

“Yield?”

~

He finds her on the far side of the administration building, sitting on the wet grass with her back to the wall, her knees drawn up so close that she’s resting her chin on them, hands grasping opposite wrists over the tops of her boots.  She looks gutted, her face hollow, eyes red, shoulders curved defensively over her own body.  She glances up at him briefly for a moment as he approaches, and then she looks away, shrinking as if she expects him to kick her.

He almost pities her as he stands over her, then he wheels and plants his back against the wall beside her.  He fishes in his pocket for his pack of cigarettes and book of matches, extracting the pack and shaking one into his waiting fingers before putting the pack away again.  He settles the cigarette between his lips as he lights a match, cupping the fragile flame in his hand to protect it from the wind and the rain.  He lights the cigarette, flicks the match into the wet grass.

He smokes silently, offering the comfort of his presence and the reservation of judgement for the time being, fully prepared to wait as long as need be.  When she’s ready to talk, she’ll talk, but until then there’s little for him to do except be available.  The rain falls light and steady, changes his hair from copper to auburn and plasters it to his face.  He doesn’t complain even as it irritates him.  He rakes his fingers through his wet hair, making a tiny sound of disgust when half of it falls back over his forehead simply from the weight of the water.

“They’re not kicking me out,” she mumbles, her voice so raw that she sounds broken, “You don’t have to stay out here in the rain.”

“Don’t have anything better to do,” he says, but that’s a lie and they both know it.  He’s been griping about the presentation he has to give tomorrow for the past two weeks, and he doubts she’s forgotten.  Still, the presentation is basically done and he’s not particularly worried about it.  He could stand to practice it a couple more times before he gives it, but he’s confident that he could do without.

“What about your presentation?” she asks predictably, looking up at him, a crease of worry between her eyebrows, the neck of her uniform open beneath her chin.  He doesn’t look at her as he shrugs half-heartedly, tapping his cigarette to relieve it of the ash at the end.

“It’s done,” he tells her because at least that’s true and that makes it easy to say.  He doesn’t want to tell her not to worry, that it’s not important.  She’ll worry anyway no matter what he says, and since it’s his final for the class, it’s pretty damn important.

“Why didn’t you tell me what you were planning?” he asks at last, because it’s the thing that weighs on his mind the most.  She could have confided in him, he could have done something, or they could have handled Hitea together.  It bothers him, too, that the rest of the Academy will look at her differently now.  They won’t appreciate her keen mind or the altruism she’s managed to hang onto in spite of the culture here.  They’ll look at her the way they look at him, see only the cold-blooded killer she might be.

“It wasn’t your problem,” she replies sulkily, without looking at him, and he takes another pull on his cigarette.  It’s not exactly untrue, but that doesn’t mean it’s true either, not from where he stands.

“You’re my mentee,” he says, smoke escaping his mouth to wreath his face briefly as he glances down at her.

“I can take care of myself,” she says, her eyes flashing as she glares up at him, eyes narrowed and lips pressed into a thin line, clearly offended.  She looks more like a half-drowned kitten than anything else, pitiful in her attempts to look fierce and he forces himself to swallow a snicker.

“You’re my  _ friend _ ,” he tells her.  It’s not an easy to thing to say, admitting that he’s not invincible, that he could be vulnerable where she’s concerned.  A long pause follows, as if she doesn’t quite know what to think about that and he doesn’t elaborate further, wishes he could skip over all the implications of calling her what she is.  Instead, he takes another drag on his cigarette and exhales a plume of smoke into the air while she mulls that over, staring at her knees like all his reasons for that statement must be written there.

How many times had he grunted dismissively when the word ‘friend’ had come up?  He’s never had friends, only allies, enemies, and neutrals.  He was raised to live and breath  _ war _ , strategy and tactics were his childhood games, there was never room for  _ friends _ .  A friend implied a kind of loyalty and trust he had never been able to bestow on another person, disappointed at the reality of humanity and it’s shortcomings.

She wasn’t any more or less perfect than anyone else, it was just that she’d been  _ there _ .  She’d just been doing what she was supposed to do, seeking him out for help, but she was careful never to waste his time.  She learned to read him quickly, had her own tentative offers of assistance summarily rejected.  Of course he had rejected her, other cadets had been trying to ingratiate themselves with him from his first hour at the Academy.  Accepting help from anyone was incurring a debt, and he was done with owing favors, loathed to be beholden to anyone for anything.

“I heard you’re good with hand to hand,” she’d said, sizing him up with a glance on a day when he’d been irritated, even angry, about a project gone wrong, “Could you spar with me after dinner?”  He’d grunted an acceptance, not really wanting to go, but grimly eager to expend all of the energy simmering hotly under his skin.  He thought that she’d bitten off more than she could chew and then been surprised when she’d turned out to be good.

It became a nightly ritual for them to eat dinner together, finish their homework, and then find a training room to commandeer.  They let their bodies do most of the talking, and gradually that had shifted.  She asked about his classes while they warmed up and he responded less grudgingly as weeks went by.  He critiqued her hand-to-hand skills during the sessions and she would adjust her techniques accordingly.  He discovered one evening that he’d run out of cigarettes and couldn’t have his usual post-spar smoke, but she had produced a new pack from her bag for him.  She’d smiled, warm and guileless, and they had ended up shoulder-to-shoulder on the roof as if that was where they were supposed to have been all along.

“Get up,” he orders, beckoning with a sharp, impatient twitch of two fingers.  She squints up at him for a moment, then sighs heavily and obeys, bracing her back against the duracrete walls of the building as she pushes herself to her feet.  She stands uncertainly beside him, unsure of what he wants, masks her doubt and hesitation with an expression of long-suffering patience.

“Here,” he specifies, pointing at the space his boots occupy as he leans against the duracrete.  Two deliberate steps and she’s standing astride one of his feet, staring defiantly into his face as if she might challenge him.  He takes in the way her shoulders are not quite squared, her weight balanced evenly across the balls of her feet, one boot toe turned out in case she decides to make a run for it.

“You ever shotgunned before?” he asks, settling a heavy hand on the back of her neck to prevent her from fleeing and pulling her closer.  Her eyes go wide as she tips forward, one hand landing on his bicep, the other finding the wall at his back as she catches herself.  She’s holding her breath as he tips her head back and studies her nervous, open face, ignoring the way they’re almost embracing.

“I don’t smoke,” she says breathlessly, agitated, trembling under his hand.  There’s something charming about the way she pretends to be fearless and innocent, two things he knows she’s not even as she stares up at him with steady, guileless eyes.  He strokes the side of her neck with the pad of his thumb, a gesture meant to reassure and soothe.  The tension in her spine shifts, but doesn’t dissipate, still coiled tight and humming under his palm.

“I’m aware,” he answers flatly, annoyed that she hasn’t answered his question.

“Yeah,” she mutters, her gaze breaking away from his and flickering anxiously between something off to his left and his eyes.  It’s impossible to tell whether she’s answering his question or accepting his offer, and his fingers twitch with his irritation, tightening a fraction on the nape of her neck.

“You need help relaxing,” he says by way of clarification, hoping she won’t have one of those rare moments of obtuseness where she can’t interpret what he’s said.  They’re few and far between, but they do happen and are all the more frustrating for it.  He’s used to her following his thought patterns the way she trails after him in person: closer than his own shadow, which is exactly where he wants her.

“Shotgun me or fuck off, Bren,” she snaps, the words cracking viciously into the space between them like a whip.  He looks down at her critically, one eyebrow lifted, and she flushes with embarrassment, but doesn’t retract her insubordination.  Her glare is fierce, with a kind of woundedness lurking in the brightness of her eyes that convinces him to let it go without comment.

He snorts, lets the corner of his mouth twitch upward into a crooked half-smile as he lifts his cigarette to his lips and takes a drag.  Her eyes drop from his to lock on the smoldering paper and tobacco inches from her face, watching intently as the embers flare with his inhale and leave behind hot, crumbling ash.  Her eyes flicker back up to his as his hand drops to his side, as his head bends over hers, smoke leaking from his mouth as he asks, “Ready?”

“Yeah,” she murmurs, dragging the word out to empty her chest.  Her upper body dips slightly, her neck arching under his grip as she lifts her mouth to hover beneath his.  He exhales, long and slow, and in turn she inhales, pulling the smoke expelled from between his lips into her lungs.  

A stray curl rises between them, coiling over her cheekbone before it dissipates, and her eyes flutter closed as she holds onto the breath, lets the nicotine seep into her bloodstream.  For a moment he feels a sense of possessiveness, as if he’s marked her lungs with his breath, stamped her insides with his ownership.  He lifts his cigarette to take another drag as she lets go, exhaling and opening her eyes to find him studying her face.

“Better?” he asks matter-of-factly, blowing a stream of smoke off to the side and flicking ash off the end of the cigarette.

She considers for a moment, head tilting, mouth soft, then sighs, “Yes.”

“Good,” he murmurs, and then uses the hand on the back of her neck to pull her into a kiss.  He presses his lips to hers, waits and wonders if he’s done the wrong thing as she stands there like stone, frozen, unmoving.  He perseveres, sure that he’s read her correctly over all these months, and when she melts against him, suddenly and totally, he’s ready to receive her.  She’s pliant and soft against his body, back arching to fit herself to his curve, thighs settling on either side of one of his own.  He drops the butt of his cigarette into the soaked grass, rests his freed hand at her waist, greedily pulls her tight to himself.

He’s not sure whose lips part first, but the other mirrors as quick as thought and their tongues slip into a sensual sync as easily as the rest of them.  She’s clutching his upper arm on one side, his shoulder on the other, pressing herself against him, blind and eager and sweet in a way that should disgust him.  It doesn’t, and though he’s cultivated and honed his cynicism to a very fine weapon indeed, he drinks deep from her mouth and wants more.

~ 

“It looks good on you,” she says, gesturing to the officers’ dress uniform he’s wearing with one hand before wrapping her arms around herself.  Technically, she’s supposed to salute and call him ‘sir’ now that he outranks her, but he can’t bring himself to point that out when she looks so vulnerable.

“In two years, it’ll look good on you too,” he says instead, and her face turns sour.

“Probably,” she mutters, looking away from him and watching the mill of cadets and their families.  The Commandant is heading in their direction, but he’s stopped to talk to an older man in an officer’s uniform, the man’s son standing tall and proud at his father’s shoulder.  The bitterness on her face gets a new dimension of longing added to it and it’s not hard to guess where her thoughts are going.

“Two years isn’t that long,” he says, catching her upper arm in his hand and tugging to make sure he has her attention.  “You’ll be busy-”

“This isn’t about two years, Brendol,” she returns, looking up at him with disbelief, and he can’t find anything to say, spends a long moment just staring into her face and wondering if he regrets what he’s done.  They knew it couldn’t last, knew that his graduation meant saying goodbye, but now they’re here and neither of them is ready for it.

“I’m sorry,” he says finally, shooting a glance towards his father to make sure that the Commandant isn’t watching before he takes her face in his hands and drops a fast kiss on her forehead.  He’s no sooner done it before he’s released her and taken a step back to a more appropriate distance.  She looks at him with her mouth open as if she wants to say something, and then she snaps it shut as her stare turns hard.

“No, you’re not,” she tells him, and then turns and walks away, leaving him with a farewell still sitting on his tongue, waiting to be said.

~

She’s startled when the door opens, turning sharply and dropping a folded shirt to the floor where it collapses into a loose heap of knit fabric on the toe of her boot.  She snaps her heels together and salutes him almost on instinct.  Most of her face is neutral, but her eyes are still too wide to conceal her surprise as he steps in without invitation.  The door hisses shut behind him.

“As you were, officer,” he says, and she hesitates, but then she lets her hand fall back to her side where it curls into a fist.  There’s a tension to her, something springy that will push back if it’s touched, and he observes it and labels it: nervousness.  He wonders if she thought that he’d forgotten, or maybe if she hoped that he had.  Either way, she’s not exactly sure what to make of him seeking her out like this, an easy thing to read in her guarded eyes.  There’s a kind of flatness to them that’s not natural, doesn’t fit his memories of her face.  “I take it you find your quarters satisfactory?”

“Yes, sir,” she answers promptly, obedient, and then asks,  “Do you visit with all your new officers, sir?”  The question almost makes him smile, but he doesn’t dare risk showing her that so soon, not when he’s not certain where they stand, where they’ll be standing.  Her question is asked with the same faux-innocence she showed him the very first time they met, but paired with those wary eyes, it’s not quite as convincing as it used to be.  He wonders how the Order’s treated her in the years since he’s last seen her.

“I do with the ones that concern me,” he replies evasively, realizes too late what the statement implies.  He curses himself for being so wrapped up in his memories, for letting nostalgia steal his precision away.  He can see the mistake he’s made in the cool lift of her eyebrow, at odds with the rest of her face, so carefully balanced between blank and neutral.  It’s like looking at a doll’s face, expressionless except for the touch of sardonicism in the arch of that eyebrow.

“You find me concerning, sir?” she asks, and her tone is dangerously even, her knuckles turning white as her fist tightens, skin stretching thin over the bones.

“Should I, Captain?” he answers, trying to stall for time so that he can come up with a different approach.  Answering a question with a question is the most basic verbal evasion, he’s capable of something vastly more sophisticated, but he’s overwhelmed.  None of the scenarios he envisioned on his way to her door at all resemble the current course of events, and he’s been too wrapped up in remembering who she  _ was _ to pay attention to who she  _ is _ .

“What do you normally find concerning enough to prompt a visit?” she counters, still unnaturally calm as she bends to retrieve the shirt she dropped when he came in.  She doesn’t break eye contact to fold it or put it away, gathers the fabric between both her hands and lets it hang over her fingers, hiding them from his sight.

“Ambition,” he says automatically, without hesitation.

“I’m surprised you don’t encourage ambition, General Hux, sir,” she remarks, her tone careful, clearly not sure where he intends to go with this.  She is not, according to most standards, truly ambitious.  She works hard, yes, and her record is impressive, her promotions well-deserved, but she’s not like so many officers he’s met, and she’s certainly not like him.

“I do, but not the kind of ambition that leaves bodies in its wake.”

The look she  _ throws _ at him is sharp with resentment, cutting through the air between them with reproachfulness so keen that it stings when it lands.  Just as fast, she retreats into resignation, shifting ever so slightly away from him as she regards him with the exasperated expression of someone preparing themselves to have a conversation they’ve had in too many ways, too many times.

“You’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve still never yet left a body behind,” she remarks dryly while he loathes the way he keeps using rote answers that are too true, but applied to someone who doesn’t deserve them.  If she were the ruthless kind of officer he ordinarily takes the time to visit immediately after they’re stationed on Starkiller, then these answers would be useful.  They would tell the officer that he’s not going to put up with the kind of cutthroat behavior that trails blood in its wake, that puts black, bloated bodies in the morgue and maimed and traumatized persons in the infirmary.

“I never said you had,” he responds because she’s not that kind of officer, as much as he’s implied it over the course of this conversation.  It wasn’t what he meant to do and he needs to control the damage he’s already done, repair it, but he doesn’t have the faintest clue how to start.

“Then why are you here, sir?” she demands, and he stares at her.  It’s an opportune moment to bring up what they had, those brief weeks of sweetness immediately prior to his graduation.  He gathers up the separate pieces of himself, attempting to shake them into order like a deck of cards, get them to fall into their proper places.  The memories are too light, the emotions too heavy, the former floating at the top and the latter sinking to the bottom.  It’s hard enough to talk about it without doing it in the wrong sequence, without spilling the delicate hope it’s meant to hold to the air between them where it’s liable to get smashed.

“Look, if this is about-” she starts, eyes dropping to the shirt in her hands as she twists it between her fingers, and he watches her, his heart pounding in his chest, ”If this is about...  _ before _ , then you needn’t-  you shouldn’t be concerned, sir.”

“I shouldn’t?” he repeats, wondering how it is she’s found the words to address this, even if she’s struggling.  She was always more comfortable with emotions than he was, was able to catch them and call them by name, even to release them because of it.  They’d had less power over her in the end than his own.  It’s likely that that’s still the case.

“I’m well aware of regulations, sir,” she says, still not looking at him as she loosens her grip on the shirt and then begins folding it.  She takes a step back, turning to the dresser and dropping the shirt into the drawer before she pushes it closed with her hand, palm flat to the drawer’s surface.

“You misunderstand.  Regulations aren't my concern.  You are.”  It’s the right thing to say, but he’s said it wrong, said it too cold because she reacts as if he’s slapped her.  She rounds on him, her mouth open in outrage before she snaps it shut and gives him a ferocious glare that would make him step back if he didn’t deal with Ren on a consistent basis.

“So you’re here just to preempt my asking for favors because of something we had ten years ago?” she snarls, her fury flaring hot and filling the room before it snaps back to her, neatly contained in the blink of an eye and all the more intense for it, “Well, I won't be asking you for anything.  I made it this far without you already, I don't need your help.”

Her head is held high, she clearly means every word she’s said, and he knows that he’s botched the entire thing badly.  He needs to do something drastic if he wants to recover, so he does: he removes his coat, slings it onto her still-bare desk, follows it up with his tunic and tossing his gloves on top.  She’s watching him with flashing eyes, angry and uncomprehending.  He runs his fingers through his hair, self-consciously turning his scarred palms toward himself, forcing himself not to smooth it back when wisps of it curve down over his forehead.

When he’s rankless and resembles his younger self a little more, he reaches for her and says her name.  He says it soft, the way he used to when they were huddled together under his coat in the rain, after they’d kissed.  Her anger isn’t quite gone, but she looks now as if she’s seen a ghost, and it’s because she’s almost frozen in place that he’s able to catch her forearm and tug her closer.  She stumbles, but doesn’t pull away, just peers up at him as if she’s can’t tell who he is.  When she finally reaches up to push the hair away from his eyes, he can’t resist turning his cheek into her palm, covers her hand with his own to hold her there.

“I’m still mad at you, Bren,” she says, and there’s something bitter, something painful in her voice that makes him want to reach for her.  He doesn’t, sure that once he does, she’ll remove her hand from his face and he’s not ready to relinquish that yet.  Not after anticipating it and waiting for it the way he’s never waited for the touch of the lovers he’s had.

“Even now?” he asks, hiding how much this too-honest statement hurts him.  He still doesn’t let go of her, can’t stand the thought of her turning away when he’s so hungry for her touch that he feels hollow.

“I’ve spent a  _ decade _ trying to forget a few  _ weeks _ .  You don’t get to pull strings and have me re-assigned.  You don’t get to do that to me,” she tells him, eyes boring into his, anger seeping back into her voice as she twists her wrist to grip at his forearm.  Except then she drops her eyes and pulls her hand away from his face as she says quietly, “Not again.”

“Neither of us is going anywhere.”  It’s a threat as much as a promise, but he’s too relieved to care.  All that matters is that she’s still standing here with him, still holding tight to him as if she can’t bring herself to let go.  “Starkiller is my project, and I need you to manage the personnel.”

“You’ve never needed me,” she says, her head snapping up so that she can glare at him, but her eyes are wet, lashes sticking together.  Her teeth are bared in a grimace that’s more hurt than it is angry.

“I wish that were true,” he mutters distractedly, raising a hand so that he can rub away the tears on one side with his thumb, “But it isn’t.”

“I hate you,” she says, fisting a hand in his undershirt and pulling.  Another step and he’s close enough to shelter her in the circle of his arm, close enough for her to hide her face against his shoulder.  He cups the back of her head and presses her closer, closes his eyes to let himself have this fragile moment, to let himself give her this comfort as she clutches at him.

“That’s fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A round of applause for K because she said "shotgunning" and then this entire chapter sprang to life like Athena from the head of Zeus.
> 
> That aside, here's a little timeline clarification for those who might need it: Hux and Reader spend much of his final year and their mentorship becoming friends. Their relationship only lasts for somewhere between six and ten weeks before Hux graduates. They don't meet again until ten years later when Hux has already been promoted to general.
> 
> ONWARD TO SOME BACKGROUND NOTES (there's going to be a lot of these because these AU chapters are really just peeks at entire storylines I considered for Crash Course):
> 
> I've taken a lot of artistic liberties with the Academy's structure. Kids are still kidnapped to become part of the Stormtrooper ranks, but volunteers like Reader are generally sorted to a different program since they start quite a bit later, generally around twelve years of age. They're conditioned until they're about eighteen, and then most are fed into the enlisted ranks. Those with high enough exit scores are slotted into the volunteer officer program.
> 
> The officer program for volunteers actually goes to a bit of trouble to break the conditioning, but also leaves it intact enough that First Order officers can fall back on it if they need to, such as in the event of capture by enemy forces. 
> 
> This AU explores a little more the idea that the First Order is an organization mostly made up of children who were raised on post-Imperial propaganda, who've been told all their lives that it's their destiny to conquer the galaxy and reestablish the empire. They're young and unforgiving warhawks that want to fight everything, so they spend a lot of time fighting each other for practice while they wait for the war to start. Hux especially has been raised to have this mentality.
> 
> The ending scene (hopefully) conveys a little about the way they've grown up. Hux and Reader aren't as hard and gritty as they were when they were younger, but they haven't gone completely soft.
> 
> Comments and Kudos always appreciated!!! Tell me something you loved, copy-paste a line you really liked, or just tell me how much you loved Hux because that's always an option. Also, please tell me if you're interested in more from this AU maybe, especially their time at the Academy because this is honestly my favorite AU of the bunch and I'd love to write more about it! Or come chat with me about it at my [tumblr](http://magpieminx.tumblr.com).


	2. The Mouth of Hell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An AU in which you are married to General Hux, and visit him on Starkiller Base.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _“How déclassé, Lord Maccon, to love your own wife.”_ -Heartless by Gail Carriger

Hux rarely allows himself to appear as if he has any emotion.  His expression is still caught between contemptuous and impassive, but the precisely picked place he waits is just beyond the range of the just-landed shuttle’s ramp.  He stands at parade rest, presenting himself at his best, as the ramp is lowered.  It's only half down when the woman appears in the doorway of the shuttle.  Her face is grave, but her eyes light up when she sees her husband.  The ramp hasn’t quite touched down in the hangar yet, but she trips lightly over it and Hux reaches out to wrap his hands around her waist.  He lifts her as the shuttle’s alusteel connects with the ground, her hands resting lightly on his biceps.

He is the first thing she has touched here on Starkiller, and as he turns to set her on the ground beside him, he revels in the fact that he can say, in some fashion, that he put his wife on his base himself.  Her hands slide down to his elbows, lingering there the way his hands linger almost reverently at her waist as they search each other’s faces.  Concern makes a tiny crease between her brows, wrinkles her nose as she frowns at the dark circles under his eyes and the tension in his jaw despite the gentle hints of gladness.  His eyes soften slightly, the corners of his mouth curving subtly upward.  She lifts a hand, wanting to touch his face, but he speaks before it reaches the level of his shoulder.

“I’ve more affairs to attend to,” he tells her, and her fingers curl into a fist that drops to her breast, “But I’ll bring you dinner as soon as I’m able, or have it delivered if I can’t do it myself.”  She nods once before he releases her waist and takes her hand, lifting it and bending to press his lips to her knuckles.  The gesture is tender, yielding, and her face takes on a kind of aching longing and relief, as if she’s waited her whole life for a moment such as this.

They pull apart, General Hux losing his softness, his wife reassuming an expression of grave serenity.  They continue looking at each other for a long moment, and then General Hux performs a perfect left-face and barks orders at a pair of Stormtroopers to escort his wife and her belongings to his quarters.

~

It's no mystery which of them is the better player.  Hux plays well, but his touch is a little heavy-handed and his music comes across a little flatter than he would like despite his passion.  By contrast, his wife plays lightly, her fingers skipping across the hologram keys with the skill of a master.  She executes her dynamics with the kind of artistry that Hux doesn't have the time to develop, evidence of the hours she spends practicing.

She rests her hands on his shoulders as he plays, murmuring advisement on his execution between pieces, and then he gently strokes the back of her neck with his fingertips while she plays, basking in her warm presence.  He had thought that after a little over half a decade of marriage that he would be less fond of her, but the opposite seems to be true.  He’s not certain whether to attribute it to old adages about distance and the heart or to the simple fact that they had felt little for each other when they first married.  It is, in some ways, no surprise that their relationship has improved and that they’ve grown fond of each other as time passed.

He still recalls her draped in white as she repeated the vows, her voice sweet and steady and without a trace of doubt.  He hadn’t known what to think of her then, except that her blind faith that everything would work out in the end grated on his nerves.  He was, and still is, a man of logic and reason, concerned with practicalities and probabilities.  While he had mentally reviewed statistics on the success rate of arranged marriages, she had quietly believed that accepting his proposal had been the right course of action.

Now, she sends him recordings of whatever she’s most recently learned to play.  Sometimes, there will be a written message attached, other times he has to glean what he can from song titles and the way the recordings make him feel when he listens to them.   _ It’s quiet, _ the last data chip had whispered,  _ the moons are out and the garden is silver and shadows, the way it was when you last visited.  Do you remember the way the fountain sounded as we watched the water fall into the basin like starlight streaming into the depths of space?  The house feels empty and I miss you, Brendol. _

He’d felt the vacancy at his side so much more keenly as he listened that it nearly brought him to tears, made him wonder if she’d cried while recording it.  There had been such wistful poignancy poured into the rippling sweetness he’d heard then, missing entirely now as she turns and catches his hand in hers, pressing a soft kiss to his knuckles.  The gesture is an echo of his greeting in the hangar, and that she returns it, however long after, means more than he expected it to.  It’s not a cheap imitation of sentiment, the lingering softness of her lips on his fingers lances straight through his heart and leaves his chest aching.

It’s a surprisingly simple thing to displace her from the chair, drag her onto his lap as he takes her seat.  She catches hold of his shoulders to stabilize herself, but then they’re nose to nose and not kissing her is an impossibility.

~

The major braces a forearm against the wall over her head, caging Hux’s wife in with his body as he offers her a sly, vulpine little grin.  The woman withdraws as much as she can, pressing her back against the wall of the corridor and turning her face away, staring at nothing with wide, blank eyes.

“You’re beautiful, you know,” the major murmurs, “Is he cold to you?  General Hux, I mean.  I can’t imagine he offers you any kind of feeling.”  He waits for a response, frowns when all he receives is a quick flicker of her eyes to somewhere around his shoulder, a split second of real eye-contact, and then she’s looking away again.  Her shoulders curve forward in a self-protective gesture, and the major considers how to handle this for a moment.  Her eyes slide up to that same place near his shoulder, hold for a moment, and then slide away.

“C’mon, love,” the major murmurs, trying again, lifting his hand to catch her chin between his thumb and forefinger and make her look at him, “Just look-”

Whatever he was going to say gets choked off as something seizes the collar of the major’s uniform and hauls him back.  He makes a strangled noise as he’s spun around, catches a glimpse of General Hux’s teeth bared in something like a grin before the General’s fist smashes into his face.  The man goes to his knees, bone smacking audibly against the corridor floor, his hands at his face as blood runs from both sides of his nose.

“Are you hurt, sweetheart?” General Hux asks, turning back to his wife, his face gone cool and serious, tinges of concern in the slight furrow of his brow.  She looks back at him with eloquent eyes as she shakes her head to say no, she’s not hurt, she’s fine and that she’s glad that he’s here.  Satisfied, General Hux turns back to the major.

“You should know better than to touch things that don’t belong to you,” he tells the man with a vicious smile, and then lands a solid kick to the man’s chest with the sole of his boot.  The major collapses backwards onto the floor, gasping and wheezing, trying to get his breath back, and then General Hux kicks him again, still showing his teeth as his boot lands in the man’s ribs.  Bones break with a dull snapping sound, and the major reflexively curls around his new injury with a bark of pain.

General Hux bends, grasping the collar of the man’s uniform and lifting him from the floor, writhing.  He draws out the moment, waits until the major meets his eyes, and then he sends his fist into the unfortunate man’s face.  One hit becomes two, becomes four, then eight, and then the number doesn’t matter anymore because the major doesn’t dare lift his hand against a superior officer.  He attempts to block the blows with one hand, his other still clutching his side, but his attempts to protect himself are weak.  

General Hux tires of using his hand, switches to his elbow, his knee, his foot.  He breaks more ribs, blacks out both the man’s eyes, leaves marks that will become vicious bruises later.  As in everything he does, General Hux is thorough and considered as he methodically reduces the major to a bloody, unrecognizable mess.  

General Hux takes a moment to catch his breath, breathing in deep and running fingers through his hair, his knuckles bruised purple and split in some places.  When he finds himself sufficiently recovered, he turns, hauling his incapacitated, almost unconscious, prey with him.  He drops the offending major at his wife’s feet, watching her serene face hungrily for a flicker of approval.  “I’m afraid I must speak for the Major,” General Hux intones with deathly seriousness, ferocity tugging the corners of his mouth upward and into a terrifying smirk of satisfaction, “But I believe he offers his sincerest apologies.”

“I’m afraid I do not accept such apologies,” she responds with equal gravity, her expression beatific as she smiles with a sweet, deceptive innocence.

“Nor should you, my darling,” General Hux answers, offering his wife his open hand.  She takes it, settling her fingers in his as she steps delicately over the major, and they proceed down the hall in the direction of Medical.

~

He’s sorry to see her go, to put her back on the shuttle that brought her to him.  Starkiller isn’t the place where she belongs, but having her near was like having a taste of home to tide him over until he can spare time enough to go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _“And this is what I wished to have, this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon.”_ -Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
> 
> And now you know where the title came from! Ironically, Starkiller could be "the mouth of hell", but my intention was to have General Hux himself be "the mouth of hell". Hux, you need healthier ways to express your aggression, smh. You can't just be half-killing officers for hitting on your wife (but tbh it might have escalated to assault so I can't blame him for getting overprotective).
> 
> Okay, so this is short and sweet and I've tried extending it a few times, but it's just not taking so it is what it is. You and Hux have been married for almost a decade at this point? Something between six and eight years. It was an arranged marriage, but since the two of you always managed to stay on good terms, you both ended up growing very fond of each other and fell in love anyway. (You fell in love first, around the third year. Hux started having feelings around the fourth year and then discovered the fifth one.)
> 
> Not really sure what else to say? You can leave any questions you might have in a comment, and comments and kudos are _always_ appreciated.  <3 Questions, comments, general (ha!) love for Hux, anything at all!


	3. Knight Errant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An AU in which you're a Force-sensitive, found by Kylo Ren and dumped on General Hux until such a time as Ren can collect you for proper training.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _“Or… perhaps Fate laid out your life for you like a dress on a bed, and you could either wear it or go naked.”_ -Days of Blood and Starlight by Laini Taylor

Of all the things that General Hux expects when he returns to his quarters, it is not to find the wildcat Ren dumped on him three days prior folding greens into partly translucent skins with bits of some kind of unidentifiable protein that she’s pilfered from the kitchens.  He pauses in the doorway to watch her, and she glances up and catches the look on his face.  Her eyes narrow as she assesses his expression.  She’s sharper than the average officer, only took around 36 hours to learn what she needed to watch for to read him, the microexpressions that he can’t quite control.

“Don’t give me that look.  I’m an adult, I’ve been around long enough to know that I have to eat green things,” she says flatly after assessing his surprise and giving him a sour glare of irritation.  She’s not afraid of him, but it’s becoming more and more difficult to tell whether that’s her mistake or if she truly just doesn’t find him all that scary.  Then again, by all accounts, she tried to fight  _ Ren _ , so it’s entirely possible that she simply doesn’t care and has no sense self-preservation.

“You didn’t strike me as someone who knew  _ how _ to cook,” he remarks, pacing across the room to hang up his coat, the door sliding shut behind him with the slick sound of oiled steel.  He continues watching her as he shucks off the wool greatcoat, studying how easily her scarred fingers flex.  They dance as they dip skins into a warm bowl of water, lay the wrappers flat on a plate to be filled with her stolen ingredients, and then fold and roll little bundles that she stacks on another plate.  It’s not the sort of thing he imagines a prizefighter doing, so the process is briefly fascinating.

“This isn’t strictly  _ cooking _ ,” she mutters, rolling her eyes as she picks up another wrapper.

“You appear to be using my frying pan,” he points out, crossing the space between them with measured strides to take the seat across from her.  This is probably the most candid conversation they’ve ever had, focused as it is on what she’s doing without him attempting to teach her to do something else, though it’s been less  _ teaching _ and more  _ telling _ .  The woman is blunt, but not unintelligent, he only needs express his expectations and she moves to fulfill them.  It’s not always exactly the way he would like her to, but so long as she obeys, he’s satisfied.

“I  _ assumed _ you wouldn’t appreciate your meat raw.  I know  _ I _ don’t,” she retorts, giving him a dubious look across the counter as she sprinkles herbs on the wrapper without looking.

“Raw protein is considered a delicacy on some planets,” he tells her haughtily, tilting his head very slightly as he rests an elbow on the surface and his chin on his fist, and she bristles, her eyes sparking with indignation.

“Following  _ specific preparation procedures _ , sure,” she says while she gives him a dour look that tells him very eloquently that she finds his sounding the depths of her apparent lack of sophistication particularly stupid, “I don’t have the patience for that right now.”

“Do you ever?”

“If I’d had a choice, I’d have gone to culinary school, so fuck you.”

“You’d never have made it through culinary school with those manners.”

“We’re not in public, you don’t intimidate me and I won’t pretend that you do.”  The statement somehow loses some of its intended effect considering she doesn’t so much as twitch in her seat at the counter, continuing to nimbly roll assorted leafy things and bite-size pieces of fried meat into the sticky skin of a wrapper.  In other ways, the fact that she hardly looks up from what she’s doing underlines what she’s said, gives it a kind of effortlessly implied emphasis that reminds him of himself more than anything.

“Oh, you pretend, do you?  Need I remind you-” he starts, only to be interrupted.

“Make up your mind already.  If you want to fight, let’s fight.  If you want to fuck, let’s fuck,” she says plainly, stacking the finished roll on top of the little pyramid on the plate on the table between them, “I hate all this dancing around you’re doing.”  She watches him with a penetrating stare that leaves him feeling as if she’s stripped him naked without permission, heat gathering under his collar as he stares back at her and pretends to be unmoved.

“I’ve no intentions of doing either,” he answers flatly, and the words feel true as they roll over his tongue.  He might  _ look _ at the creature Ren left in his care, but he won’t  _ touch _ her because she’s not his to have, even briefly.  He’s almost certain that Ren would take issue with it, and while that’s appealing in its own way, he doesn’t have the time or the energy currently to handle yet another pissing contest between the two of them.

“Bullshit,” she responds, still holding his eyes with that depth-piercing gaze, “You can’t stare at me for less than ten seconds at a time, and sometimes you lick your lips while you’re at it.  Other times your hands curl into fists like you want to hit me so badly you can’t help it.  Get over yourself and choose one, I don’t care which it is.”  She doesn’t fidget, confident that she’s pinned him down, but he doesn’t so much as shift, refusing to give her the satisfaction of confirming that somehow, impossibly, she’s seen right through him.  He makes a careful note not to underestimate her powers of observation, wonder if maybe Ren’s claim that she’s Force-sensitive has something to do with how quickly she’s come to her conclusions.

She sighs and breaks eye contact first, reaching for one of the rolls and saying, “Look, if you want a free hit, I’ll give you one.  You can pay me back for that one punch I landed on you.”  She dips the end of the roll into a saucer filled with a dark liquid, bites off the dripping end of the roll as if she’s not continuing to try and embarrass him.  Maybe from her point of view, she’s not, but he doesn’t particularly relish having to remember the way they met when Ren carried her in slung over his shoulder, snarling and stringing together obscenities in combinations that had had most of the command center staring.  Soldiers are never strangers to profanity, but the sheer creativity cycling haphazardly through no less than six languages had been nothing short of impressive.

“That won’t be necessary,” he says, grimacing as he recalls Ren spilling her onto the floor and pinning her there with a boot on her chest.  Ren hadn’t let her up until he was sure that she was clear that Hux was to be her master until he returned, and then Ren had turned and left without another word.  Naturally, the first thing she did was scramble to her feet and launch herself at Hux, still sputtering at Ren’s back, and he’d taken a hit that had fractured his jaw, delivered as it was at the end of a flying leap with the deadly power of master precision.  He’d managed to subdue her, but they had both ended up in the medbay.  Somewhere between that fight and the medbay, she’d mentioned that she fought for a living, or had until Ren had taken her.

“So fucking then.  I’d prefer that,” she says, breaking through his reveries, still munching on the last bite of her roll.  One side of her mouth has curled upward into a wicked little half-smile that’s far too smug for his taste.

“I beg your pardon?” he demands, taken aback at how she’s chosen to interpret his response.  It’s presumptuous in the extreme and regardless of the fact that she’s not wrong about which option he would prefer, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s not going to.

“What?  You’re attractive, you can handle yourself, you’re all about control and finesse and technique.  I bet you’re a great partner,” she says, her eyes still too penetrating and now sizing him up according to some standard that he knows nothing of though it sounds as if her assessment is very complimentary, “Powerhouses are overrated, honestly.  There’s only so much mindless pounding a girl can take.”

“We will not be having any kind of sexual relations,” he declares, speaking slowly so that she’s sure to understand, “When Ren comes back, he’ll be taking you to wherever it is you’re supposed to be to continue your training.”

“All the better.  No strings attached.”  She says it almost cheerfully, and that’s not expected either.  For the most part, she’s reminded him of Ren, brooding as she trails after him, silent and sulking.  Brightness is not what he would have expected from her, but then he didn’t expect her to be as intelligent as she’s proven again and again that she is.

“You must be joking,” he says to fill the silence while he reminds himself that he should be less surprised in the future when she reveals hidden depths.

“I’m not your subordinate, I don’t care what Ren told you, and I’m leaving as soon as he gets back.  Sounds like the perfect circumstances for a fling.  You seem like you could use one.”

“It would be unseemly.”

“When you make up your mind, you get back to me,” she says, giving him an amused glance as she deftly picks up another roll.

~

She rolls out her shoulders, back arching as something cracks audibly.  If he were less familiar with the sound, he might wince, but instead he watches as she pulls first on one wrist and then the other.  She moves on to her legs, and he finds himself both glad and disappointed that he’s not standing behind her as she bends over to slap her palms on the floor.

“I thought you were already warmed up,” he says, allowing himself to sound slightly snide instead of hungry.  As it is, his voice is a bit lower than his normal tone, though she seems not to notice considering the way she leans further into her stretch, her elbows bending a little before she bounces back up.

“Droids and holograms never compare to real people,” she says conversationally, lacing her fingers over one knee and pulling it up toward her chest before she rotates it out and stretches it back in a surprisingly graceful arabesque that she holds for a moment before repeating the process with the other leg.

“Our training program is based mostly on droids and simulations,” he says testily, “And it seems to work well enough.”  He glares at her, and her smile is amused as she clasps her hands over her head and reaches for the ceiling, back arching again.

“Look, I’m not here to insult you.  I’m sure your ‘Troopers are more than proficient,” she says, “But real people… they’re different.”  Her smile doesn’t waver, although it shifts from mere amusement to something sharper, something treacherous that can’t be trusted.  She lets her hands fall, rolls her shoulders one more time, and then she’s still, poised on the balls of her feet and looking loose and limber and surprisingly unthreatening.

“How deceptive,” he murmurs, looking at her and resisting the urge to rub at his jaw as he remembers their highly physical introduction.  He runs over the information he gleaned from the encounter briefly: she has a formidable right jab, a borderline terrifying left roundhouse kick, and is astonishingly skilled at submissions.  All three of these facts are important in and of themselves, but together they point toward a degree of skill in hand-to-hand that has not been overexaggerated.

“Are you just going to stand there or are we going to fight?” she drawls, sounding uncharacteristically lazy as she drags her vowels out and adopts a lilting speech pattern uncomfortably like his own.  

In lieu of answering, he lunges forward and swings at her.  She looks absolutely delighted in the eyeblink before she gets her hands up to guard her face.  His fist hammers against her forearms, and then her foot is smacking against the inside of his forward knee and he almost stumbles as he draws away from her to regroup.  He stares at her, analyzing her defensive stance, and she peers at him over her knuckles with a fierce little grin.  He doesn’t normally throw the first punch, but there’s something about her that rubs him the wrong way, probably related to the way they met.  She had the first hit then, it seems fair on some level that he gets the first hit now.  It’s not even remotely satisfying though, not when she nearly broke his jaw and he’s probably done little more than leave a bruise.

He goes after her again, feinting for her dominant side and then weaving back to her weaker side.  He doesn’t pull his punches, doesn’t go easy on her.  She blocks him neatly, but gives ground anyway, retreating first one step, then two.  He takes up the space immediately, reeling it in, lets himself be reduced to single-minded focus and sheer aggression.  Her token retaliation leaves much to be desired, nothing like her introductory punch or the way she nearly knocked his knee out just a moment ago.

She dodges his elbow and then her fist is smashing into his stomach with all the power she hasn’t been using.  It knocks the breath from his lungs, but he grabs at her shoulders and brings his knee up.  She tears herself away and for a moment their eyes meet and something like a connection sparks between them.  He wonders what she sees as he takes in the exultant ferocity in her face before her fists are up again and hiding everything below her eyes.  He retreats, feeling winded, trying to re-analyze her.  His own defensive style is about not giving any more ground than strictly necessary, but she seems to have an entirely different, but no less effective, one.  What does her offensive look like?

He’s no sooner thought the question before she skips half a step toward him, throwing a mid-level kick on one side and following it up almost impossibly fast on his other side.  He blocks them, feels the impact jar all the way into his shoulders, shuddering through his collarbones, and then she’s wheeling and he has to duck to avoid getting kicked in the face.  He tries to take advantage of her recovery, but she’s ready for him, catching his fist and neatly deflecting most of the force of his punch and driving her shoulder straight into his chest so that he almost falls backwards, only just gets his feet under himself.

He’s startled when she springs forward and tackles him instead of maintaining her preferred distance, sends them both flying with her arms wrapped around her waist.  He curls around her to keep his head from hitting the floor when they land, brings his knee up into her middle, making her gasp for air.  When they do hit the floor, their combined weight knocks the breath from his lungs so that he can’t breathe.  She’s ready for it, climbs up his body and gets one of his elbows under a knee, pinning it against his side.  It’s only by sheer strength that he prevents her from capturing his other elbow similarly.

He’s startled when she drops her upper body onto his and claims his mouth like inevitability, her lips soft and hot and demanding even as she pins his hand to the floor beside his shoulder.  He freezes, then responds almost before he knows what he’s doing, fighting her grip on his wrist.  He wants to wrap his fingers around her throat, feel her swallow under his palm, take back the control she’s stolen from him so neatly.  He has the distinct feeling that she  _ knows _ this somehow and is amused by it, so he sinks his teeth into her lip, tugs and grinds the sharp edges of his incisors into the silken skin.  She groans against his mouth, her grasp on his wrist loosening instantly, caught off guard by his retaliation.

It’s almost pitifully easy to free himself, and then his hand is exactly where he wants it: wrapped firmly around the column of her neck.  He flexes the arm under her leg, plants one foot against the floor and bucks.  He half-expects her to resist, to fight him for it, but she doesn’t.  He rolls them both and then surveys the results from his new vantage point.  With her knee slung over his elbow like this, it’s only too natural to slot his hips between her spread thighs.  Above his hand, tight around her throat, her lips are parted and her eyes have half-closed.  There’s a soft, heady kind of haziness to her expression, and he can’t resist leaning in to get a closer look.

“If you want to do this, then we do this on my terms,” he warns her, though it’s probably unnecessary given the way her neck arches to press into the curve between his thumb and index finger, “That means  _ you _ submit to  _ me _ .”  He squeezes to underline his point, pressing his thumb and fingers into the soft places under her jaw.  She moans, the sound low and raw as she squirms under him, one palm hot against his thigh, her shaking fingers gripping his wrist unsteadily to make sure that he doesn’t ease his hold on her neck.  He relaxes his grip on her throat anyway, eases off the pressure just because it’s not what she wants, just to drive home who is in control of the situation.

“Yes, yes,  _ please _ -” she pleads, panting and whimpering as she tugs at his arm.  He cocks his head as he looks down at her, bemused that after so little, she’s already begging.  He never planned to indulge himself in this way with Ren’s latest excuse for a project regardless of his own interests.  Then again, he had never planned to tempt himself by pinning her underneath him like this.  There’s a touch of a flush high on her cheeks and an arch in her back, and even his self-control unravels when presented with these hints of wanton need spread out so willingly for him.  

“Please  _ what _ ?” he purrs, head cocking ever so slightly as he watches her with cruel amusement.  He’s barely touched her, it’s almost too easy, but one slip of judgment shouldn’t make a difference, a brief dalliance of an affair, not meant to last, should be fine.  They’re both consenting adults, and if Ren has issues, he can take it up with her.

“Please, sir,” she says obligingly, and then gives him a rebellious little grin that’s more teeth than anything, fierce and taunting and not at all submissive, “I want some more.”

~

Ren comes for her the very next day, of course.

Hux exchanges a brief glance with her before he turns his attention back to Ren.  She trails after Ren obediently when he commands it, and Ren says nothing although Hux can feel the weight of Ren’s brief stare on his back.  He shrugs it off and drops the entire incident into a dusty box that he intends never to open again.

Except she comes back.  It must be her, because he’s seen the Knights of Ren enough times to know that he’s never seen this helmet before.  The faceplate is a clean surface of polished chromium that reflects light back like a mirror, a sharp, bright contrast to the matte darkness of her clothing and armor.  She is smaller than the rest, partly because there’s just not as much mass to her, but also because she’s not padded with weapons, explosives, or fabric.  Rather, she’s a sleek lick of darkness outfitted with lightweight leather plating carved with a pattern that Hux has never seen before.

The point, however, is that she slips in and out of his peripheral vision for over a week, and there are rumors that a Knight has been called in to weed out traitors and spies.  Tension levels shift high and leave the air humming with tension, and Hux himself is not unaffected given the way she’s shadowed him for several minutes at a time before vanishing inexplicably for hours and returning again as if she never left.

“Is this your idea of a joke?” he asks dryly when he comes back to his quarters to find her folded into a position of meditation at the end of his bed, her helmet resting in her lap.  She flinches, her eyes opening as she squints at him like he’s too bright and it hurts to look at him.  He thinks, briefly, that if it does, she should get out.

“You’re pissed,” she says, sounding so very much like Ren that Hux reflexively swallows the vicious words sitting in the back of his throat.  He hates how much she sounds like Ren, can’t help thinking that he preferred her bluntness from before-

“I’m not really any different than I was before,” she protests, and he shoots her a glare.

“You weren’t reading my mind before either,” he points out, though the effect of his tone is more like stabbing the point of a stiletto through the concept rather than simply indicating it.

“Your anger,” she says slowly, “It makes you project.  It’s hard not to listen when you’re pissed off.  Especially when you’re mad at me.  You start  _ directing _ it at me.”

“Good, then you’re aware when I have no patience for all this obtuse subterfuge,” he says, the words clipped as he goes about taking off his coat, hanging it up and then proceeding to unbuckling the belt around his waist and unhooking the front of his tunic.  He ignores her, still sitting on the floor at the end of his bed like an unwanted gift.

“He told me I should practice on you,” she says, sounding as if she’s chewing on a fingernail, or maybe her cheek.  Either way, her enunciation isn’t as crisp, and he finds it irritating.

“Practice what?” he demands sharply, wheeling to look at her, tunic still in his hand before he turns away and says, “No, you know what?  I don’t want to know.  Just get out.”

“What?” she asks incredulously, as if she can’t believe what he’s saying as he hangs his belt from the hook inside his wardrobe door.

“You heard me,” he responds flatly as he takes down a hanger to hang up his tunic.

“I’m sorry-” she starts to say, only to have him interrupt her.

“ _ Out _ .”  The word snaps out of his mouth with all the command he’s spent years cultivating, unforgiving and authoritative.  He accompanies it with a withering stare that makes something in her eyes falter.

She picks up her helmet in her gloved fingers, rises to her feet and obeys.

~

She holds her cup of tea between her hands, not drinking it as she watches him drain his own with a bemused half-smile.  He’s certain that she’s heard what he’s been saying, if only in his mind.

_ Not one word. _

He pours himself another cup from the kettle before he replaces it on the floor by his feet.  She takes a sip from her cup, studying him with fathomless eyes through the steam rising from her tea.  The cup drops to the level of her chin, and he meets her eyes and wonders what she sees that she watches him so intently from her seat on the mattress.  It’s bold, direct, nothing like the way he was not-looking at her before.

Unexpectedly, she tips the cup toward him in a silent toast, her smile shifting from bemused to contented before it’s obscured by the handleless porcelain in her hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this was actually the original idea behind Crash Course! A Force-sensitive, illegal fighter getting picked up by Kylo Ren and trained as a Knight. Position-wise with the Knights, Reader is a Scout, someone who goes in and gathers information. The position itself is pretty Rogue-like, so Reader is technically very replaceable to the Knights (and also still in training in that you need to prove yourself to them as someone reliable and devoted to the cause).
> 
> I'm sorry if the ending seems a little tacked on?? I wanted to have Hux and Reader on good terms again, but the moment I wanted to work with wasn't something drawn out, it was just very brief. I toyed with the idea of ending it after Hux got snippy, but... I'm a sucker for a happy ending.
> 
> In the end, I didn't go with this idea for Crash Course because I feel like the Force-sensitive thing has been done enough by other people (and pretty well too).
> 
> Questions? Comments? Left kudos already but want to leave them again? (Just write in "Kudos" in that case, if AO3 will let you get away with that.) Want to talk about Hux? I love all your comments and read them all, even if I don't respond to them right away. Much <3 until next time! (And you can find me here at [my tumblr](http://magpieminx.tumblr.com) if you want to follow.)


	4. As If From A Dream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An AU in which you are a captured Resistance spy, broken by Kylo Ren and then taken by General Hux.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _“What love did then, love does now:_  
>  _Gnaws me through.”_ -Sylvia Plath, from **Dialogue Between Ghost And Priest**  
>  _“(Brittle you were, yes,_  
>  _but so lovely.)”_ Mary Jo Bang, excerpt of **Pilgrimage**  
> 

Her feelings are surprisingly uncomplicated, as far as he can tell, for the situation at hand: she is tired.  This means that when he offers her his hand, she takes it, and when he runs his fingers through her hair, she closes her eyes with the pleasure of it.  She performs whatever little tasks he assigns her with the same assiduous diligence marked in her record as an officer of the First Order.  His sheets are folded crisp and tight around his mattress, his boots polished and standing neatly in the bottom of his armoire, every surface in his quarters gleams.

It’s a pity he can’t trust her with anything else.

He takes another sip from his glass of brandy and his eyes flicker from the datapad in front of him to the woman sitting by his feet.  She’s resting her head against his knee, her hands loosely clasped in her lap.  He suspects her eyes are closed, though from this angle it’s impossible to tell whether she’s dozing or not.  He has an inclination to stroke her hair, but with one hand occupied with the datapad and the other by his brandy, he relegates the impulse for a later time.

They have an unspoken understanding in this relationship not to take advantage of the other.  Neither of them attacks when the other drops their guard, and together they allow themselves a kind of calculated stupidity.  It only goes so far, of course, but it’s much farther than anyone would expect between a captured spy and the General of the First Order.  They eat and sleep in the same space with relative confidence.  He says nothing on those occasions when he catches her crying and in return she listens when he complains at the end of a trying day.

The only caveat is his expectation that she will answer his every question promptly.  She’s never failed to capitulate to this demand, no matter the content, the timing, how similar or how different it is to another question he’s asked.

“If you’re tired, you should go to bed,” he says briefly before taking another sip and turning back to the datapad.  He scrolls through a new section of the briefing as she shifts and straightens, rubs her cheekbone against his thigh, just above his knee.

“I have nightmares when you’re not there,” she responds, her voice soft and sweet and nearly slurred.  If he were in a different mood, he might find it arousing, but he’s tired too.  If the day had not been so long and if his mind were not still too active, he would have gone to bed an hour ago.

“You have nightmares when I’m there anyway,” he comments, finishing the whiskey and passing the glass to his other hand to set on his desk.  He sets the tips of his fingers in her hair, combs through it idly and she sighs.

“They’re not as bad when you are,” she admits quietly, turning her face into his knee.  It’s difficult to tell whether it’s to self-soothe her fear or her shame, but it could easily be both.  He considers finishing reading the briefing in bed while squashing a small impulse to not finish reading the report at all.  He could finish it over his caf in the morning, but the thought of leaving the small task unfinished leaves a bad taste in his mouth.

“I should be ready for bed in another twenty minutes,” he tells her, “You can stay or you can go now.”

“Who taught you to be kind?” she murmurs so softly that he can’t tell whether she meant him to hear the question or not.

He pretends that he didn’t and she doesn’t move.

~

“You were the last person they should have picked for this,” he observes, resting his chin in his hand as she blots her hair dry with a towel from the refresher.  She pauses, studies his face and the way he’s looking at her as he sits at his desk, and then shakes the towel out with a snap of her wrist.

“I know,” she responds tonelessly, carefully lining up the corners and pinching them together with one hand while she uses the other to align the edges.  She doesn’t look up at him again, remains unnaturally focused on the towel between her hands instead, folding the fabric into neat quarters, and then again into eighths.

“Why you then?” he asks, hoping for some insight that will give him an idea of how to shift protocols to catch others like her.  Of course there are others, what military organization would send only a single spy into the enemy’s stronghold?  Hux highly doubts that Leia Organa is stupid enough to pile all her eggs into a single basket, but finding the other baskets has proven to be more of a challenge than he first assumed.  

“I’m not the only one.  Or I wasn’t.  But they lose most of us, you know,” she answers wistfully, her tone soft and mild, even more so than it normally is.

“Lose you to what, exactly?” he presses, his attention focused wholly on her now rather than divided between her and his nightly glass of whiskey.  He runs his thumb over the etched glass of the tumbler idly, feeling the two plain rings of his rank encircling it while he scrutinizes her.

“The conditioning, mostly,” she confesses, plucking at and straightening the hem of her singlet, “If the initial conditioning didn’t work, we were told that a reconditioning or two would usually do the trick.”

“You were never sent to reconditioning,” he remarks contemplatively, recalling the detail from her file effortlessly.

“No.”  She smiles wryly as her eyes flash up to meet his, glittering with the kind of sly cunning that he knows she possesses, but never expected to see displayed.  If he were less in control of himself, he might catch his breath and gasp, might let his eyes widen and his lips part in surprise.  His stony lack of reaction, however, does not seem to bother her in the slightest.

“How else did you manage, besides that?” he asks as he watches her body language shift from guilty to coy, the slant of her shoulders as coquettish as her self-satisfied smirk.  Whatever else she feels about the reminder of her work, she’s proud of what she managed, though her pleasure doesn’t last.

“I don’t really know,” she admits, her smile fading as she looks down and turns the towel over in her hands, “Sometimes I think it’s because…  In another life, I would have been happy to follow you.”

It’s not the answer he was expecting, and he’s glad that she’s not looking at him so that she can’t see the brief flash of surprise crossing his face.

“Would you like to clarify that statement?”

Her hands still for a moment, her face thoughtful as she considers how to explain what she’s said.  Her eyes flash up to meet his, her expression going sharp and calculating, assessing him.  Like the artful and flirtatious duplicity she exhibited before, this unexpected, shrewd appraisal forces him to control his expression so as to appear cool and untouched rather than intrigued.

“You’ve a very powerful presence, General.  If I’d been born in a place where I joined the Order first... I would have idolized you.”  She says it slow and careful, every word weighed before she lets it slip past her lips.  Despite the heavy consideration devoted to diction and syntax, genuine truth rings in every syllable.

“And as it stands, you what?  Find me distasteful?” he says it dismissively, as if the answer means next to nothing to him when, secretly, he’s flattered by her might-have-been.

“As it stands, I only admire your fortitude and ambition.”

~

“Congratulations, General, it seems you’ve rooted us all out,” she murmurs when he tells her that he can find no others like her in the ranks of either Stormtroopers or Officers.  She doesn’t even lift her head from his shoulder when she says it, only shifts closer and settles against his side.  He only knows her eyes are open because he can feel the brush of her lashes against his bare skin.

“Ren tells me I shouldn’t believe you,” he remarks as he runs his knuckle idly down the back of her arm.  Even now, her skin pebbles with goosebumps and she shivers lightly, pressing herself against him in a way that’s enticing in its sheer neediness.  Was that what prompted his impulse to take Ren’s leftovers?  He’s never been able to pinpoint any specific stressor that might account for his (continuing) lapse in judgement, that moment that could be arrogance, strategy, weakness, or all three at once.

“I’ve told you all I know about finding others.  If you can’t find them, then they’re not there,” she says lightly, although the words imply a heavy sense of finality that’s at odds with the way she’s said it.  She pauses then, before adding, “Or they’re not active.”

“Ren says that you had another mission besides intelligence.”  

She goes silent when she hears him say it, waiting to hear what else Ren has told him, where he plans to take this revelation.  She’s holding her breath too, deathly still against his ribs, a kind of tension dancing in the air around her.

“Tell me about your secondary mission,” he prompts, and she hesitates because though it’s technically phrased as an order, there’s a question implied.  She lets go a shallow exhale against his collarbone, then inhales deeply before sighing.  He gets the sense that she’s shaking together her information, laying what she knows against what he’s shown, determining how much she can continue omitting, if she can continue hiding it at all.

“It wasn’t a secondary mission,” she says after a long moment of silence, and there’s a reluctance as she says it.  The words are slow and too carefully enunciated to sound natural, and then she stops, as if she’s unwilling to reveal more, as if holding this one thing back could redeem her.  A glance downward shows that she’s biting her lip, her cheekbones flushed pink again.  Ten minutes ago, he would have found it charming.

“Then what was it?” he asks, letting faint irritation seep into his voice, a warning scrape of the knife’s edge.  He doesn’t want to play this game, thought that he wouldn’t need to play it with her.  They had an  _ agreement _ about questions, and it doesn’t please him to have find out that she’s been exploiting the glaringly obvious loophole in it.  It pleases him even less to have it thrown in his face by Ren, who treats it like some kind of readily apparent weakness of character.

“In addition to gathering intelligence, my objective was to remove inactive agents,” she tells him, speaking fast enough that it takes him an extra heartbeat to untangle the syllables.  He is, at least, mollified that she’s willing to cooperate now, more concerned with pleasing him than hoping for that impossible redemption.  He didn’t even need to threaten her.

“Set a spy to catch a spy,” he murmurs contemplatively, turning the idea over in his mind.  It’s not overly novel, he would be more impressed if he were less aware of the tangled realities of intelligence work.  It’s never as simple as sending someone into enemy territory with a mission, much less a mission to eliminate those who might have been their allies in other circumstances.  Similarly, compromised intelligence agents are a dangerous thing to leave unattended.

She’s living proof of this fact as she rests against him.  Three weeks of interrogation left her exhausted and spiritless.  Ren’s involvement had been enough to make her spill information like water, resigned and desperate to avoid further pain.  In comparison to her counterparts, she has done much, much worse than forget who she is and what side she’s on.

“They’re no longer on our side at that point,” she says briefly, though the way she says it is neither as crisp nor as clipped as he expected it to be.  He finds it ironic that she denies affiliation with the inactive agents when, effectively, that is exactly what she has become.  Perhaps this accounts for the unexpectedly subdued tone.

“I’m surprised that the Resistance would sanction such a grisly mission,” he observes truthfully.  He could see himself ordering such a mission easily; it’s much more difficult to think of the Resistance and the Republic, soft as they are, ordering the deaths of their own agents, compromised or not.

“We do not receive orders  _ only _ from the Resistance,” she admits, “We have private backers in the Republic.”  She turns her face into his chest, frowning as she nuzzles her cheek into the skin below his collarbone.  He can sense her frown more than he can see it, but the way she seeks comfort in physical contact suggests that she’s upset by the confession.  Is it the information itself, the implications of the information, the implications of telling him, or the fact that she’s told him?  Is it all four of these possible reasons, creating a web of bad feeling that she can’t escape from?

“You must have left quite the trail of bodies behind,” he comments, shifting the focus to other, more concrete results to draw her out of the miasma of abstraction.

“You’re overestimating how many of us there were,” she says flatly.

It’s telling that she still says ‘us’ when referring to them after saying that they were no longer on the same side.  She’s claiming them, counting herself among them, or maybe she just can’t forget where they came from originally, these lost children of the Republic.  It could easily be both.

“How many, then?” he asks because it’s the logical thing to ask, because he’s curious how many enemy agents were in the First Order, because he wants to know how many people she’s killed since she went through the initial conditioning.

“Three others,” she says quietly, without any pride.  He wonders, briefly, if they haunt her the way the deaths of the ‘Troopers and Officers she killed on the day she was caught don’t.  Perhaps she saw them more like mercy killings, just a more physical version of what she believed the conditioning had already done to their psyches.  Maybe, in spite of that, she still feels guilty.  The latter seems the more logical hypothesis to him: it’s more evidence of the softness that should have been stamped out of her years ago.

“Then, according to your methods, the First Order is currently free of enemy agents,” he muses aloud, a warm sense of satisfaction suffusing his chest and curling down his spine like lingering smoke.  The pleasure of it overshadows his irritation that she hasn’t been entirely forthcoming with him.  He unwraps his arm from her shoulder, pushes her onto her back and then rolls onto her so that they’re pressed together from chest to knee.  He braces his elbows on either side of her shoulders, tilts his head as he looks down into her face.

She seems so young as she stares back at him, apprehensive.  This isn’t the reaction she anticipated from him and she has no idea what it means or how to respond to it yet.  He cradles her head as he watches her think, rethink, and over-think, though she never so much as twitches.  When he drops his mouth onto hers, she kisses him cautiously, but arches her body up into his.  Her arms are warm around his ribs, hands gentle as they settle under his shoulder blades.

“If I catch you withholding information like this again, you will regret it,” he informs her when he pulls away.

“I understand, sir,” she answers softly, looking away as if ashamed.

~

“I've decided to send you to reconditioning.”

He says it conversationally, as if it’s of no importance at all.  It’s just a fact, a piece of information he’s passing to her verbally as he pulls his gloves off.  Behind him, there’s the soft sound of fabric falling to the floor, followed by a strained, unnatural silence.  It’s only after he’s taken a moment to smooth his expression from anxious to impassive that he turns to look at her.

She’s staring back at him, her mouth dropped open in shock, her eyes filled with a kind of betrayal that unnerves him more than it should.  A heartbeat passes, then two, then three, and then her face changes to something soft and sad as her eyes drop to the gloves in his hands.  Wordlessly, she holds out her hand to take them, and though he almost hesitates, he gives them to her.  She doesn’t look up at him as she bends to retrieve his coat from the ground.  She tucks the gloves into the right side pocket, then folds the wool and lays it over her arm.

“I wondered-” she murmurs, then pauses as she holds his coat close against her middle before looking back up at him and continuing, “But it's the right decision, isn't it?”

“The right decision?” he repeats, unsure whether she’s taking this better or worse than he expected.  Resignation he expected, but of the angry variety, or the fearful.  Not this soft lostness that makes him want to reach out and take his coat from her arms so that he can comfort her instead.  He watches as she turns away from him, still cradling the bundle of wool draped over her arms close, almost clinging to it.

“From where you stand it is.  It's the only one that makes sense, at least,” she says with a shrug, this matter-of-fact observation delivered in a monotone that makes him feel even more uneasy than he already did.  He watches as she shakes out his coat and hangs it up, turns back to him with a face as unmoved as his own.  

“It's the logical one,” he confirms, because it is.  It’s the culmination of everything she confessed to Ren, everything she’s told him.  He can’t dispose of her outright, he’s become attached enough that the idea is unpalatable to him, but she’d said that reconditioning was the key.  If the initial conditioning didn’t make a spy forget who they were, what their mission was, then the reconditioning did.  She’s never been to reconditioning, something she’s admitted to and was confirmed in her file.

He unbuckles the belt at his waist, hands it to her, then deftly pulls open the tab at the neck of his tunic, unzipping it before he shrugs out of the garment.  He hands both the belt and tunic to her and she takes them.  She turns to hang the items up as he bends to unzip his boots, and then she asks, her voice dropped again into that quiet resignation from before, “Will I-  Will we meet again?  After?”

“It's possible, but unlikely,” he answers, feeling like he might already regret this decision and trying not to let it leak into his voice.  It seems more difficult to keep his voice neutral than it usually is, but he doesn’t want her to start begging him and make a scene.  The decision is already made, the orders in the system, Stormtroopers selected to pick her up and take her away.

“Will you still be fond of me if we do?”

He doesn’t reply right away, not wanting to reveal the impact of this timid question.  It’s something he’s asked himself repeatedly while he was arranging everything.  He hates to admit it, but he’s grown used to her presence in his quarters, even enjoyed it.  Enemy agent or not, traitor or not, there had been something refreshingly honest between them, something he’s reluctant to let go.

“Perhaps,” he says carefully, not sure if he wants to comfort her or push her away, not sure which option serves her more than him.  The idea of comforting her makes him feel dirty, like he’s taking advantage of her emotional state to draw her closer before he sends her away.  Pushing her away isn’t much better, because there’s no call to be unnecessarily cruel prior to their impending separation, to the erasure of everything that she was and is.

She still looks gutted by this non-answer when he looks over at her, shrunk in on herself and lost again.  In fact, she looks like she might be on the verge of tears, and he feels a fluttering sense of alarm in his stomach.  He doesn’t know what he’ll do if she starts crying, he’s never known, no matter how many times he’s walked in on her doing exactly that.  He’d always ignored it, thinking it kinder to say nothing.  He has a feeling that this time saying nothing would be the worst thing he could do.

He wrestles with the urge to give her something to anchor herself with though he has next to nothing he could give.  Even if he did, they would take it from her as she went through reconditioning, might even extend her time there for having hidden something.  He suspects that his desire has something to do with his inability to think of her as someone other than she is, an irrational train of thought at best.  The probability that they’ll meet after she’s been through reconditioning is incredibly slim, and she won’t know him except as the General of the First Order afterwards.  It wouldn’t be anything like what they have now.

“How long until-” she starts, then stops, sounding afraid for the first time since he told her.  He can’t resist reaching for her now, though he hates himself a little for it.  She doesn’t resist when he draws her to him, just leans into him, hesitant.

“Until the start of my next shift.”

~

He's not sure what to think when he recognizes her from across the room, sees her staring at him like he’s something she saw once in a dream.

Like she  _ remembers _ . 

She shouldn't, wouldn't be here if she did, but something in his chest seizes, won't let go even when she drops her eyes and fidgets.  The grey jumpsuit looks like it’s much too big for her, the sleeves and legs rolled up at wrist and ankle, extra fabric bunched where it disappears under the orange vest.  She adjusts the cuff at her wrist, then forces herself to drop her hands to her sides and pretend she’s not watching him from the corner of her eye.  

No, he decides, watching is the wrong word for it.  There’s something hungry, yearning in the way she watches him.  It’s like she can barely bring herself to look away, as if she’s completely fascinated, as if she might drift toward him were she not consciously restraining herself.  There’s a kind of awe in her wide-eyed gaze, and a question too as she peeks at him from under her lashes.

_ Are you real? _

He wants to offer her his open hand, wants her to grip his leather-shielded fingers with her bare ones.  He wants to feel the warmth of her palm against his knuckles while she traces the back of his hand with a fingertip to assure herself he’s real.  The idea of it makes him lightheaded, but it could just be the effect of not having eaten for several hours.  Surely she’s only looking at him like this because of his position, because she knows who he is, as she should.  It has nothing to do with her remembering who she was, what they had; she doesn’t know any of that.

He still finds himself striding across the room toward her, his trailing lieutenant dismissed with a flick of his hand.  The line of technicians straightens when they see him coming, their supervisor pausing in calling out their assignments for the day.  It’s gratifying to see them all staring, wary, strokes his ego while he settles on an excuse to get her away from the rest of them.  He clasps his hands behind his back as he covers those last few feet, stops an arm’s length away from her and pretends to survey the line of technicians.

“General Hux, sir?” the supervisor says, trying to sound staunch failing, thus dismissing himself from Hux’s attention.

“Postpone this technician’s assignment for an hour or two,” he tells the supervisor, indicating her and seeing her go white in his peripheral vision.  He pretends not to have noticed as he steps closer to her.  It’s only one pace, but she flinches like he’s almost walked into her.

“The hospitality droid assigned to my quarters needs adjusting,” he hears himself say, and the excuse sounds flimsy in his own ears, but none of the technicians challenge him, wouldn’t dare to do it. The supervisor is promising to note the adjustment in assignment, but all of that is secondary to her reply.

“Yes, sir,” she responds, meek and timid as she drops her eyes.  It’s not exactly the same as when he first properly met her in the interrogation room she had spent the better part of three weeks in, but there’s something similar in her manner now.  It’s something about the way she can’t meet his eyes and cringes away, like she expects him to strike her.  It’s not a matter of  _ if _ he’ll hurt her, but  _ when _ .

He turns on his heel before anything else can be said, crooking a pair of gloved fingers as he rotates.  There’s no pause between turning and taking that first step away, striding down the corridor toward the hallway that houses his quarters.  He hears her scrambling to follow him, running three steps before heeling somewhere behind his right shoulder like a well-trained pet.  She stays there down all the many corridors of the Finalizer, out of the way of the passing officers who snap to attention as he passes.  He acknowledges the officers curtly and her not at all.

Even once he reaches his quarters and keys open the door, he doesn’t say anything to her, doesn’t even turn to see if she’s followed him in.  Instead he listens for the sound of her footsteps, too slow to match his racing heart.  He can sense the moment approaching, the heavy truth of it making his thoughts scatter with fear.  He startles when his hospitality droid whistles politely and rolls out to greet them.  He hears her breathe a sigh of relief, stepping toward the droid.

“What settings did you want adjusted, sir?” she asks, dropping down to a knee and reaching for the droid’s activation switch, her other hand hovering over the flap of a pocket on her thigh.  She’s focused almost entirely on the droid, though her polite inquiry signifies that she’s listening for his response.

“None of them.  Stand.”

She freezes with terror for a moment, and then her body obeys mechanically, pulling her back to her feet and turning her to face him.  She’s barely breathing, blinking rapidly and avoiding meeting his eyes, and for a moment she looks even smaller than she did the first time he saw her.  He dismisses the droid in an attempt to give her a moment to collect herself, but the effort is wasted when he turns back and she’s still radiating apprehension and fear.

“Do you know who I am?” he asks her directly, staring hard at her and willing her to say the right thing, give him the right answer.  It’s unbearable that he doesn’t know what the right answer is, but he only has what he has to work with: a need for her to reach for him because she  _ knows _ him.

“General Hux, sir, of the First Order-” she starts to recite, like the obedient technician she appears to be, but it’s not the answer he’s looking for and it’s his own fault.

He’s asked the wrong question.

He doesn’t know what the right question is, much less how to ask it.  All he knows is that he wants her to remember, to know him, to be who she was before he sent her to reconditioning.  His frustration increases the more he tries to understand it all, why he needs to ask her this question, why he needs to hear her answer, why it needs to be the right answer, why he wants her to remember when that’s the last thing he should want.

On impulse, he takes a long, aggressive stride toward her, reaches out with his gloved hands and takes her face between them.  She’s too startled to respond when he bends and kisses her, and then she’s scrambling backwards, away from him, eyes wide and lips parted with fear.  She reaches behind her, searching for something to brace her back against.  He pursues her, stalking angrily over the space that’s opened up between them, disappointed at her reaction as much as his irrational reaction.  Part of him is scolding himself for scaring her like this, but he feels as if he’s not quite in control of the situation, something that gives him more anxiety and heightens his frustration.

She backs right into the wall of his quarters, and then it’s all too easy to pin her shoulders as he bends to kiss her again.  He makes a conscious effort to be more gentle this time, though he suspects he’s not as gentle as he’s trying to be-

He almost jerks away in surprise when her arms suddenly circle his neck, when she rises onto her toes and latches onto him, responsive and hungry for his touch.  She’s holding onto him a little tighter than necessary, as if she’s afraid that he’ll pull away and leave her.  He lets his hands drop to her waist, deliberately adjusts the angle and pressure of the kiss until it’s less desperate, more affirming.

“Who are you?” he whispers against her lips when they separate for breath.

She tells him her number, her rank, her position, but it's the wrong question again.

“What are you?”

And finally it's the  _ right _ question.  He knows it because the thing in his chest that clenched when he first recognized her suddenly relaxes, even before she answers.  She’s confused by the question, it’s there in the way she stares at him, the way he can see her flipping through her conditioned responses.  She drops her eyes when she runs out of possible replies, but then they flash back up to meet his almost instantly, something instinctive and primal in her gaze.  When she speaks, he feels the power of her whisper in his gut, the unassailable  _ knowing _ that drives it.

“Yours.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhh, yes, I return with an update for Courses. I'm supposed to be writing my final papers because the semester ends this week, but shhhhhhhhh. I finished this and wanted to post it.
> 
> I was really taken with the Captured Resistance Spy idea, but again, it was one of those ideas that other people seem to have done a fair bit and so I passed it over for Crash Course. I love the internal conflicts that both the Reader and Hux have here about their relationship, and their awareness of the circumstances. There's Stockholm and Lima Syndrome here, compromise, and a lot of identity questions for the Reader character. 
> 
> Comments? Questions? Hux? Extra kudos? (Just type "Kudos" in the comment box if AO3 will let you do that, I don't mind.) I've linked my tumblr in previous chapters, so I won't do that here


	5. The Desolation of Angels

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An AU in which both General Hux and you were found to be Force-sensitive after the destruction of Starkiller and some of the aftermath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _“Bitter, bitter, this desolation of angels.”_ Days of Blood and Starlight by Laini Taylor  
>  _“Your soul sings to mine.”_ Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

“Are we allowed weapons?” she asks quietly without looking at Supreme Leader Snoke in the stone audience chamber, staring only at Hux whose eyes never waver from hers.  They both look so calm, so tranquil, but Kylo and Snoke can feel the desperation rippling through the Force, an airless scream of horror and revulsion.  Kylo flinches at it, but doesn’t intercede.  His Master has spoken, and he can only hope that Hux will win, that he can keep the General.

It’s punishment, for both Kylo and Hux, for the repeated failures and the massive disaster that was Starkiller’s demise.  Hux will lose either his life or his aide, and Kylo will lose Hux or one of the very few things that makes Hux truly happy.

_ Impossible choice- _

_ No, I can’t, I can’t  _ **_do_ ** _ this- _

_ I love- _

_ This is  _ **_wrong-_ **

“No,” Snoke says after a suitable pause, “Begin.”  The command is accompanied by a dismissive gesture, and Hux’s aide licks and bites at her lip.  It’s the first sign of nerves that she’s shown, but Hux does not indulge any such display of emotion.  Kylo can feel Hux and his aide’s whirling trains of thought, nearly identical in both content and the crests of panic, and it makes him  **ache** .  They never understood how similar they were, how connected, to the point where Kylo wonders if maybe, given time, he could have wanted Hux’s aide too.   

They both understand that dying here would be the easier thing.  The one who lives may not survive the rest of Snoke’s tests, but what living they manage will be full of suffering.  The desire to spare the other that fate is strong in them both, pulsing and shimmering around them with a sickly kind of Light that Kylo can see as he watches.

When she steps forward, rolling out her shoulders after shedding her tunic, Hux responds in kind, mirroring his aide.  They cross the open space, both determined to fight to kill even if it goes against every instinct they have.  They turn to face each other, standing at arm’s length in silence.  Their expressions give away little, but hers is softer than Hux’s, already hinting at regret, though whether it be for dying or killing remains to be seen.

“I’m sorry,” she tells him, offering her his hand.

“Don’t be,” he responds, gripping her forearm while she clasps his in kind before they let go.

And they fight.

Hux swings his fist at her with brutal efficiency and she ducks, throwing a kick that he dodges to avoid.  She comes up and uses her momentum to drive her fist forward, but Hux blocks her effortlessly with a forearm and returns the favor with a hook that slams into her jaw and sends her stumbling.  Hux takes a long step forward to press his advantage, and then she recovers and delivers a kick that lands solidly in his abdomen.  It knocks the breath from him so that he staggers backward, coughing.  

She does not press her advantage, instead takes up a defensive stance and waits for Hux to catch his breath.  She’s focused, but still there’s a part of her that holds back, crying out at the wrongness of it.  That part of her wants to weep, wants to go to her knees at Hux’s feet and surrender, but the rest of her recoils from the idea.  Abandon Hux to Snoke?   **_Never_ ** _.  He’s  _ **_mine_ ** _ , you can’t have him. _

Hux wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, panting and looking both disappointed and relieved.   _ You could have gotten in one more hit. _  But he’s glad, so glad, that she didn’t.  Another kick like that and she might have incapacitated him and he can’t have that.  She’s not allowed to have the advantage, she’s not supposed to survive this.  If one of them has to suffer, it should be him.   _ It was  _ **_my_ ** _ failure,  _ **_you_ ** _ should not be punished for it. _

As if on cue, they throw themselves at each other, trading blows and dodging aside in a sadistic dance.  She ducks out of the way of Hux’s elbow and Hux blocks her knee before it lands in his side.  She takes the moment of his distraction to deliver a vicious backhanded slap before he delivers a low kick to her knee that almost sends her to the floor.  She retreats three quick steps, limping, but he follows, his fist snapping out in a jab that she almost doesn’t catch on her forearm.  The distraction works and he delivers another kick to her injured knee and she yelps, stumbling and hitting the ground.

Instead of tackling her, getting on top and potentially ending the fight, Hux looks stricken and suddenly steps back.  He watches as she hops back up, balancing her weight on her uninjured foot, testing her hurt knee while she watches him warily.   _ It’s not supposed to be this way- _

She leaps forward without warning, launching off her uninjured leg and lashing out powerfully with the other foot, clearly less injured than she was pretending to be.  Hux ducks aside just in time, the heel of her boot skimming his hair, and then he comes at her back.  She lands and delivers another kick straight back that slams savagely into his sternum and sends him reeling.  She spins and pursues Hux, executing a sharp pattern of punches that Hux barely gets his arms up to defend in time.   _ I know you want to spare me, but- _

She overextends, leaves herself open, and it’s impossible to tell whether she’s done it on purpose or subconsciously.  Hux lands a hard blow against her ribs and she grunts, crumpling to the ground.  She haphazardly hooks a foot around Hux’s knee and yanks, interrupting his kick by spilling him to the floor and aiming for his face.  If she can get the angle right, she can break his neck-

Hux rolls away and she scrambles back to her feet, and then they’re facing each other again, sizing the other up.  Again, their thoughts move in nigh perfect synchrony, caught between wanting to end the fight quickly and not wanting it to end because ending means that one of them will be dead.  Kylo wonders what he’ll tell the one who survives, whether he’ll mention how closely they mirrored each other even in thought.  Could they have Force-bonded unintentionally?  He has no idea what it would feel like if they had, but he doesn’t sense a living conduit between them.  There is only emotion rippling through the Force from one to the other and back again like a song, calling and answering, resonating in harmony they’re not even aware of, or at the very least, not consciously so.

This time, they circle one another.  They don’t feint, just match one another step for step, drawing closer as they prowl around each other.  Each footfall is careful, their eyes locked, their faces impassive, their emotions roaring around them in a hurricane of glass and steel.  The physical stalemate doesn’t last long as they clash again, eerily silent except for the sound of flesh impacting flesh and harsh breath as they exchange hits.  Hux unleashes an onslaught of powerful punches punctuated with another kick at the same knee, and she falls back, limping again.  Unlike before, the injury this time is real.

She sucks a breath between her teeth, knowing that she can’t allow him to knock out her knee.  She has to be able to use her legs if she’s to have any hope of winning.  Hux could probably kill with a kick, but he could just as easily kill her with his bare hands.  He has more options than she does, and this makes her wary as she retreats from him, waiting for him to come after her.

He doesn’t.  He stands and waits, even beckons her closer.   _ Let me end this, sweetheart. _  She almost chokes on the tenderness of what the gesture means, her mask crumbling to reveal something raw underneath.  Hux is unable to take this revelation in stride and he falters for a moment, freezing where he stands.  She can’t manage the impassive expression anymore, armors herself with bitterness instead, and then she’s moving toward Hux like wind and he’s ready for her.

The sound they make physically as they dance is quiet and arrhythmic, but in the Force they sound like a massive thunderstorm reverberating constantly through the air.  There’s a brief, deathly silence as Hux grapples with her and she struggles to free herself.  Hux moves like lightening, teeth bared, focused on the soft flesh of her throat, and then she headbutts him savagely.  The skull-on-skull impact is too much for them both and they break apart again, staggering and dazed.  They move into each other’s reach before they’ve really recovered, landing ineffective, inefficient blows, hits that glance off and are almost harmless except that it leaves one or the other wide open.

She steps into Hux and swings a powerful uppercut that smashes into his chin and makes his teeth come together with a vicious click.  He stumbles backwards, and this time she doesn’t hesitate.  She follows close, lashes out and breaks his ribs under her shin on one side and her knee on the other.  Hux goes to a knee, clutching his torso, panting, and for a moment she’s standing over him, almost the victor.

She backs away from him, hurt and regret creasing her face as she bites her lip, hating herself.  Hux gets back to his feet, slow, careful, holding his aching ribs and watching her with that mixture of disappointment and relief again.  This time, there's worry there too, and frustration,  _ Why won't you let me end this? _

_ You know that I would die for you.  Let me live for you too. _  She hates the perversion of it, but she means it, means it with every cell of her body even though her emotions riot in their confusion.  Hux steels himself against his pain, physical and soul-deep, and then springs toward her like a great, red-gold predator, all bared teeth and dark eyes and violent intent.  She holds her ground as he winds up, then skips backward out of reach as he drives his fist forward.  Hux stumbles and she turns, her foot arcing through space as she pivots.  Her back arches, her upper body dipping, and then she snaps her boot back in, hinging on her injured knee.

The sole of her boot meets his chin, torquing Hux’s head up and around, hard and fast.  His neck snaps audibly, and then he crumples to the stone like a puppet with cut strings.  She brings her foot down, stands motionless for a heartbeat, and then she, too, falls.  She lands squarely on Hux’s body, her fists on his shoulders, her face in his chest, grief and rage and self-loathing screaming through the Force.  The first sob sounds like its been torn from her chest, a deep, wet sound ripped from between clenched teeth.  The others sound less painful, but more animal than human as she weeps.

Kylo wants to hate her, and on some level he does.  She wasn’t supposed to win, he didn’t want her to, he had wanted Hux to live, to be his apprentice, to have Hux latch on to him in the wake of her death.  That was the story Kylo had hoped for, but that story has fallen apart and now he’s left with Hux’s killer, the woman Hux loved and who is so much a living reminder of Hux that there is a part of Kylo that simply can’t hate her.

“And so does it end,” Snoke says simply, with cool satisfaction, but Kylo is the only one who hears it.

~

He pulls her to her feet and she leans against him, too exhausted and broken to resist, sick with grief and almost unable to look away from Hux’s still-warm body.  Helplessly, she twines her shaking fingers into Kylo’s robes and rests her cheek against his chest.  The surface of her mind is all practicality, the reminder that Hux is dead and there’s nothing she can do for him now except remember him, but the undercurrents of her thoughts are a keening torrent of pain and loss, underscored by the firebrand of self-hate.  He shouldn’t feel pity for her, but he does, and he wraps an arm around her shoulders the second Snoke’s hologram vanishes.

She’s confused, too distracted by the turmoil in her own brain to realize that she’s muttering her thoughts aloud under her breath.  “ _ I didn’t want this-  But if it had to be one of us-  I wanted it, I did want this, I had to-  There wasn’t a choice-  He wouldn’t have- didn’t want-   _ **_Brendol-_ ** _ ” _  His name is like salted claws in a wound already pouring blood onto the floor, tears her vulnerability wide open.  It has the soft feel of flesh, leaves Kylo feeling uncomfortably like he’s buried his fingers in warm meat, but her grip on his robes tightens and her shoulders jerk and he can’t disengage.  He can almost hear Hux snapping at him, telling Kylo to take care of her now that Hux can’t do it himself.

It would be a kindness to give her that easy, mental nudge into unconsciousness, but Kylo doesn’t think she would want it and it wouldn’t help her accept what she’s done.  Instead, he loops an arm under her knees and lifts her off her feet, cradling her carefully against his chest.  She makes an involuntary noise of pain, then rests her face in the folds of his cowl.   _ Damn you, damn Snoke, damn the fucking Force- _  The words are as angry as they are blasphemous, but the emotions underneath are despair and heartbreak and Kylo gives no indication that he heard as he carries her from the room.

~

This is how she keeps him.

She limps down the halls of the  _ Finalizer _ , bruised and hurting from sparring with too many Stormtroopers, chest aching worse than the knee that she never lets heal properly.  The coat over her shoulders is too big, the hem pinned up in back so that it doesn't drag, the smell of the man who once wore it long since faded.  Sometimes she dabs a bit of aftershave into the collar and lets herself slip into memories almost too sacred to lay a finger on.

She stands on the bridge in silence, balanced on one foot, overseeing his legacy.  The new general doesn't like it, but this ship is her inheritance, and if it were not, she would  _ take _ it.  She would  _ destroy _ it before she lets someone else take command of the place where his presence is so strong.  Sometimes she can still feel the backs of his fingers against her cheekbone, his sigh against her ear, as she listens to Mitaka deliver the daily status report.

She seeks solace on a planet of rain and trees, unerringly finding her way to one tree in particular where she can still faintly feel their signatures entwined.  The symbol of the First Order grows there in the bark, a piece of her own handiwork, and she presses her palm to it and feeds her own energy into the tree.  Sometimes even three systems away, she can feel this tree if she tries, a beacon of herself with that thin thread of  _ him _ preserved in it.

She learns, under Kylo’s tutelage, how to forge heartbreak into a weapon and despair into a shield.  The other Knights rage and laugh with their blades and blasters and bombs, but she goes into battle with tears under her helm and steel in her hands.  Sometimes she lets herself believe that she can bring him back, pull the pieces of him she stumbles over in the Force together, if only she spills enough blood and breathes enough death to find out the secret of  _ how _ .

She tears at Kylo with her nails, hating him for letting her kill Hux and loving him because he is the only person who remembers Hux anything like the way she does.  He pays her back with teeth and bruises, hating her for killing Hux and loving her for being the strongest living reminder of the man they’ve both lost.  Sometimes Kylo almost kills her when she’s lying under him in his bed, and she thinks that it would be a fitting end, poetic enough that she doesn’t fight the hands wrapped around her neck.

She changes nothing in his quarters when she moves into them, carefully maintaining the environment so that it feels like he might walk in at any time.  She feels the pain of it worst when she wakes in his bed, cold and alone, the only scent on the sheets her own.  Sometimes she takes the greatcoat to bed with her, that dab of aftershave rubbed into the collar, burying her face in it until she slips into dreams of happier days.

She performs her duties as if in a waking dream, an abyss in her chest wrapping tentacles of numbness around her torso, a feeling that is only broken on those nights when she shares Kylo’s bed, when he burns away the aching apathy with his mouth and hands until she breaks open, raw and feeling again.  Sometimes she pretends he's Hux when she's curled against his sleeping back with her eyes closed, a broad expanse of warm skin under her cheek and fingertips, and it kills her a little every time she opens her eyes and he’s not.

And that is how she keeps him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was heavily considering rewriting this chapter, but I decided that I'd done enough stalling with it.
> 
> Snoke's choice to punish Hux and Kylo for the failure of Starkiller here is mostly because Snoke sees Hux's aide as a viable replacement for Hux himself. Obviously this totally ignores the First Order's chain of command, but as Supreme Leader, Snoke probably has the privilege of being able to appoint people to high ranking positions. On top of that, Kylo is there to enforce Snoke's decision, should anyone decide to argue. Once Reader is trained, it's unlikely that she'd endure many overt challenges to her command either. As mentioned toward the end, she very much takes the stance that if she can't have what remains of Hux's legacy (as it were), then she would destroy it all. In addition to that, Reader's belief that she's finding Hux in the Force is actually ambiguous since non-Force-sensitives don't leave behind ghosts the way Force-sensitives can.
> 
> Reader's relationship with Kylo is, clearly, an unhealthy one. They both refuse to let Hux go, blame each other for Hux's death, and are trying to use each other to replace Hux in a lot of ways too. Since Reader is trying to use Kylo as Hux's stand-in, I've chosen not to tag this as Kylo/Reader. I've also not tagged Kylo/Hux since that relationship very much a part of the background and not really part of the focus.
> 
> I've also chosen to stick with the name that I gave Hux back when I first started writing this entire series since he didn't have a semi-official first name then.
> 
> Not sure what else to say other than that kudos and comments are deeply appreciated!!!


	6. In Which General Hux Asks If You Trust Him

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which you feel abandoned by your parents, eat cake, and decide to trust General Hux.

You sit in the dark, staring blankly at the lit screen of your datapad as time slips by, unnoticed.  It takes three looks for you to actually register the time: twenty eight minutes past 0300 hours.  You need to be awake around 0600 hours to dress and make it to General Hux’s office for your scheduled duty hours, but even as tired as you are, sleep is simply out of the question.  You’ve laid your head on your pillow no fewer than three times, and every single time has ended with you tossing and turning until you’re sitting up with your datapad on your knees again.  You draw your messages down, and the loading symbol appears above the topmost line for a moment.  The hexagon of the First Order’s emblem remains stationary as the sixteen-point center spins, and for a moment you believe that there will be a new message at the top, sender and subject and timestamp bolded-

The loading symbol vanishes, your inbox bounces back up, and there is no new message with bolded type.  You bite your lip and try not to feel crushed as you rationalize it.  It’s not like you’ve been on good terms with your parents since the incident with Hitea.  It’s more than just that you embarrassed yourself and nearly got expelled, more than just that they never approved of your going to the Academy.  They just can’t understand how  _ their _ daughter, the one they encouraged to pursue music, could be so violent, so vicious, as to almost kill someone.  They don’t want to believe that their child could be capable of cold-blooded murder.

Still, hot tears prickle at your eyes and you bite your lip, trying to stop yourself from crying again, hating that you’ve cried at all.  It’s just another birthday, it’s not something that should matter all that much, it’s not even the first birthday where they’ve ignored you.  You have bigger, more important things to worry about, like whether or not the new shipments of alusteel and foodstuffs will be arriving on time this week and whether or not Kylo Ren will be returning and infuriating General Hux to the point of distraction.  These are the things that you should be worrying about, not the lack of a “Happy Birthday!” from your parents.

You take a corner of the sheets and rub it angrily across your cheeks, forcibly controlling your breathing so that it can’t hitch and break, can’t tip you over from silent tears to sobbing.  You remind yourself sternly that you really have nothing to cry over.  You have a relatively comfortable, if small, bed covered in warm blankets tucked away in the well-insulated walls of the officer’s quarters on Starkiller.  You’re issued everything you need, paid enough to purchase most of what you want if you feel so inclined.  You eat decent food every day and find your work fulfilling.  You’re in a relationship with one of the most powerful men in the First Order and he prizes your loyalty.

Your personal pity party is interrupted by a knock at the door, and startled, you knock your datapad to the floor where it lands with a thump.  At this hour of the morning, there’s really only one person who would be at your door, and right now, you’re dreading facing him.  You don’t want to have to explain yourself to General Hux, who will not fail to notice your red eyes, and if there are tear trails on your cheeks, he’ll notice those too.  He’ll assume that something has happened, and the idea of telling him that you’re extremely disappointed by the fact that your parents have apparently decided to disown you makes your stomach twist.

Except you dropped your datapad and the sound was more than loud enough to be heard outside the door, especially at this hour of the morning when Starkiller is blanketed by the deadly hush of sleep and snow.  Your mouth twists into a grimace as you reluctantly get out of bed, scooping up the datapad and dropping it onto your mattress before you step over to the door.  You scrub your face with both hands for a moment, scratching at your cheeks with your nails and trying to make sure you scrape away all the salt on your skin.  Finally, you rake your fingers through your hair in an attempt to calm yourself, and then you open the door.

General Hux is just about to return to his own quarters, but he turns back with a look of surprise on his face, as if he didn’t expect you to answer the door at all.  He looks so much less tired than you feel, in spite of the dark circles under his eyes, and you have to wonder why he’s awake at this hour.  He’s mentioned that when he can’t sleep, sometimes he’ll go back to the office, but that doesn’t explain why he’s stopped by your quarters.  The two of you have a well-established routine now: he’ll let you know as you’re leaving the office if he’s planning on dropping by your quarters or if he wants you to come to his.  In either case, your evenings together typically start around 2100 hours, give or take a half hour or so.

“What happened?” he asks, his voice tight as he takes in your face, and because it’s half-past three in the morning, you just lean tiredly against the frame of the door and casually wave a hand.

“Nothing, sir, I was just waiting for a personal message,” you tell him, and then you sigh to keep your breath from hitching at how very real vocalizing makes the entire situation, “It just… it never came, that’s all.”  You don’t even have the energy to flinch when he frowns, or to shy away when he bends a little to inspect your face a little more closely.

“It’s your birthday, or it was yesterday,” he says without preamble, and you find yourself too exhausted to do more than nod confirmation.  It doesn’t surprise you that he knows because General Hux is the type to keep a mental dossier on the people he surrounds himself with, particularly people that he might care about.  Since you qualify on both counts, it would be more surprising if he  _ didn’t _ know when your birthday was.

“I’ve something for you, if you don’t mind coming to my quarters at this hour,” he continues, straightening up and then offers you his hand.  You blink at his proffered palm, not entirely sure how to take the gesture.  No invitation to touch him is given casually or without thought, not even now, and when you look up at his face, his expression is gentle.  There’s compassion in his eyes, the corners of his mouth just turned up into an almost-smile, the overall effect that of kindness.  It’s an expression you’ve only seen on his face maybe once or twice, and only in the safety of his private quarters.

“I don’t mind,” you say, your voice so quiet and small that you feel like it might belong to someone else as you shyly put your fingers in his.  He tugs you out the door of your room and secures you against his hip, keeping you there by draping his arm around your shoulders.  You lean into his touch as he guides you to his quarters, duracrete cool under your bare feet, quietly appreciating the comfort he’s offered so readily.

“Sit here, please,” he murmurs in your ear after leading you to his bed, and you settle onto the foot of the mattress, crossing your ankles as you watch him cross to his kitchen.  He busies himself with filling a kettle and finding a box of tea, and then produces a small box from a cabinet.  You tilt your head, not understanding until he opens the top of the box and folds down the sides and reveals a small cake.  It’s maybe a little more than a handspan in diameter, but the frosting is a warm, pale cream, textured with a pattern of ridges and embellished with artful curlicues.

You have no idea what to say, particularly not when General Hux looks at you over his shoulder and finds you frozen, your hand over your mouth.  You’re not even breathing, and when you exhale behind your fingers, you start searching for words to say, words that are lost the second you inhale and feel yourself tearing up again.  It’s not that you thought General Hux didn’t care, just that you would never have expected him to show it so openly, not even in his quarters.

“Am I right in assuming that the message you were waiting for was going to be from your parents?” he asks, still watching you over his shoulder.  You try to answer, but the tightness in your throat tells you that your voice is going to be an unattractive croak, so you opt to simply nod instead.  He turns back to the cake, lifting the board it’s on free of the box and whisking away the cardboard before he continues, his back still to you.

“You seem to feel as if you’ve been abandoned and have no place that you belong,” he says quietly, and while it almost seems like he’s speaking to the cake, you know he’s not.  These words are meant for you, and the matter-of-fact way they’ve been spoken leaves you waiting with baited breath as much as it carves open the wound you’ve been trying to seal.  “That belief is incorrect.  Your place is with me, never forget that.”

You end up covering your face because you’re failing completely at trying to hide how emotional you’re getting.  The tears well up, hot and burning as they trail down to spread over the places where your palms touch your face.  You hold your breath to contain the raw, rough noise that wants to escape, but the second you exhale and inhale again, the sob breaks from your throat.  You cringe at the way it sounds, but you can’t stop it, can only try to prevent future ones.

The light touch on your knuckles startles you, and you look up to find General Hux standing over you, a plate in one hand and a napkin in the other.  He offers you the napkin first and you take it, drying your tears and wiping your nose with it, wishing morosely that you were prettier when you cried.  Some people have that trick up their sleeves, being pretty when they cry, but you’re not one of them and you never have been or ever will be.  It seems unfair that anyone could be pretty when they cry, but you sigh deeply as you dab another tear away.

And then General Hux kneels in front of you, and all you can do is stare at him as he takes the fork balanced on the edge of the plate.  He digs it into the cake, scoops a bite off of the slice he’s cut, then holds it up in front of your mouth.  Your eyes flicker between the cake on the tines of the fork and his face, but his expression is expectant and hesitantly you open your mouth.  He deposits the bite of cake on your tongue, retracts the fork and watches your face intently.

The cake is divine, soft and moist, with the perfect ratio of cake to frosting, the flavor strong, but not overpowering.  It’s  _ delicious _ , and though the artistry of the decoration alone told you that it couldn’t have come from the mess hall kitchens, the taste and the texture tell you that it absolutely must have come from a bakery on another planet.  You almost feel sick when you think about the expense required: the person picking up the cake needed to be paid, even if they were just returning from another mission.  There was fuel consumed by the craft going to, stopping at, and then returning from another planet.  There was the cost of the cake itself, made with real ingredients and likely expensive for its size.

Bite after bite of the slice of this costly cake disappears into your mouth, and you have no idea what to do other than accept it.  General Hux looks satisfied, even pleased at your reaction, as if the simple fact that you  _ like _ the cake makes it worth every credit he had to put into it.  You wonder, briefly, if he used his personal funds or if he used First Order funds to get it, but say nothing since you’re fairly sure that he would be offended by the question.  Instead, you watch the plate, realize that there’s only a single, small bite left.  “Aren’t you going to have some?”

“Hush,” is all he says, delicately spearing the last bite of cake onto the fork and holding it up for you to eat.  You take it delicately with your teeth, and then General Hux is on his feet and taking the plate and fork away.  He sets them in the sink, opens a cabinet to find a mug, pours hot water from the kettle into it.  He drops a tea bag into the cup and then turns his attention to the dish and fork in the sink.  You almost spring up, not wanting him to have to wash the dish he used to feed you, but his voice stops you.

“Don’t,” he says, but there’s a command there in the word that you obey instinctively, “I’ll only be a minute.”  And he is.  He sets the plate and the fork in a rack beside the sink to dry, turns his attention to the cup of tea he left on the counter.  Another cabinet reveals a bottle of whiskey, and he drops a generous dollop of it into the cup as he extracts the tea bag with his other hand.  He picks up the mug and brings it back, extending it to you and allowing you to take it.  “Drink it.”

“Yes, sir,” you murmur in response, sipping at the tea.  It’s warm, not too strong, and you close your eyes to savor the way it washes away the last of the cake.  You inhale the steam, fragrant and floral, recognizing the scent.  It’s the same tea that you prepare for General Hux in the mornings, the cup he drinks instead of having breakfast or caf.  You have the fleeting thought that you should have a cup of it more often, wonder if you actually like the tea or if you just want to fondly remember the current circumstances in which you’re drinking it.

You've no sooner finished the tea before General Hux has taken the empty cup from your fingers, setting it down somewhere around your feet as he kneels again.  It's still a little strange to see him at this angle, his face a little lower than yours as he settles back on his heels to study you for a moment.  It's a subservient kind of position, his being on his knees, something he's avoided and that you've never pushed him to give.  You have no idea if he wants you to initiate or if he has a plan in mind already, so you wait for some kind of indicator, dropping your hands to the edge of the mattress on either side of your thighs.

You don't have to wait long.  He rises up on his knees, lifting his hands to cradle your head between them, fingers sliding into the hair at the back of your neck on one side and his palm cupping your jaw on the other.  He tilts your head precisely, pursing his lips as he studies the angle, and then he covers your mouth with his own.  His lips are warm and soft against yours, moving achingly slow, loaded with intent and purpose.  He kisses you again and again, each time increasing the pressure of his mouth against yours, until your blood runs hot and you’re lightheaded and dizzy.

“Don't you know?” he murmurs against your cheek, nosing his way back to your ear before his lips are burning a slow trail down the side of your neck, his hands tilting your head away from his face to expose more of your throat.  There's something right about his mouth there on your pulse, something powerful, and you close your eyes with the intensity of it, your breathing hitching and going unsteady.  You almost wish he would bite you there, shivering at the thought and gripping the edge of the mattress, digging your fingers in to anchor yourself.

“You’re mine,” he growls, vibrations shimmering onto your skin, “You belong with me.”  You groan quietly at the words as he finds his way from your jaw to your collarbone, following the line of the tendon in your neck.  He scrapes his teeth along your clavicle, laving some points with his tongue, sucking gently on others.  It’s as if he thinks you’re made of candy, and he can draw sugar up through your skin to taste if only he applies his mouth in the right way.  He’s leaving bruises behind, you’re sure, but well below the collar of your uniform.  Still, he rarely leaves marks on you, and you bite your lip to contain a whimper.

He withdraws, and you're left blinking at him, dazed.  His expression is surprisingly lacking in possessiveness, almost too serious as his hands reach for the hem of your undershirt and lift it.  You lift your arms and he pulls the garment off, tosses it aside in an uncharacteristic show of carelessness, but all his attention is focused on you and it leaves you breathless.  He looks up at you as he wraps his hands around the curve of your ribs, just above your waist.  He runs them up to your breasts, palming them with a firm touch, but that’s nothing in comparison to the way he holds your gaze.

“Do you trust me to give you what you need?”  It’s a question heavy with implication, and not one that he’s asking lightly.  He’s not asking merely if you trust him, he’s asking if you can trust that maybe he knows what you need better than you do.  He’s never asked you for submission, but now he’s asking you for a kind of surrender, and your stomach tightens at the thought of putting yourself so wholly in his hands in so vulnerable a state.  It goes against everything you’ve ever been taught, and suddenly you understand why he’s asking.  Losing is one thing, surrendering is another thing entirely, and a shameful one at that.  

General Hux isn’t your enemy or even your opponent, especially not now, but the idea of trusting him that far thrusts you quickly and unpleasantly from kiss-drunk to too-aware.  Suddenly the air is too cold and his hands are too hot, his gaze too penetrating and his body too close.  You feel boxed in, panicky, and then abruptly he pulls back, dropping his hands into his lap as he watches you with sharp, assessing eyes.  He’s weighing you, finding you lacking, and you bite your lip and struggle not to reach for his hands and pull them back to you to prove that you’re not lacking, that you’re  _ worthy _ of his attention, his touch.

“What are you afraid of?” he asks, still watching you in that way that makes you feel more naked than you are.

“Would you think less of me if I did?” you whisper, trying to ignore the urge to pull your knees to your chest, to curl up and make yourself smaller, less of a target.  It’s an irrational response to the situation, there is no physical threat here.  Defending against an emotional threat doesn’t require body language that gives away every subtle nuance of what you’re feeling.

His eyes and mouth soften, the latter curving subtly into a light smile when he says, “No.”

Hearing him say it is reassuring, though it doesn’t ease your nervousness.  If anything, you’re more tense than you were before because now the moment, and the mood, is lost.  Before you were certain that things were going to turn sexual, albeit in a soft way.  Now, you’re not sure where things will go from here.  You almost want to apologize, but you’re not sure if doing so would be the right thing to do, for reasons you can’t quite pin down yet.

“May I?” he asks, running a knuckle up your calf, pulling your attention from your thoughts back to him.  There’s still that soft, near-smile on his face as he looks up at you, and for a moment General Hux looks almost sweet.  Silently, you nod, reaching for him.  For the second time, he rises up on his knees and kisses you, does it just as carefully this time as he did the first time.  His hands slide around your waist, pulling you closer to the edge of the bed, and you drape your arms over his shoulders and close your eyes.  His physical touch is reassuring, if only because he handles you so confidently.  He knows exactly how to build you up without overwhelming you, and you let him.  He kisses you without hesitation, though you sense that these kisses are no less considered than the ones from before he asked if you trusted him.  It doesn’t matter that they’re so calculated, they don’t feel any less natural.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Annnnnnnnd this concludes this installment of the series! I hope you enjoyed reading all these different ways that Crash Course could have gone and this final chapter that's part of the actual Crash Course storyline. 
> 
> You can find me on tumblr [here](http://magpieminx.tumblr.com), and kudos and comments are always super appreciated!


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